Douglas County Sheriff Radio

[JASII]

I will be in the Twin Ports next week. Is the Douglas County Sheriff P25 traffic simulcast across all towers?

Also, is EMS from Gold Cross? Do they use WISCOM? ARMER? Conventional?

(Is Gold Cross now know as Mayo Clinic Ambulance Service?)

 

[box23]

Douglas County uses voted multi-cast. Many on this site use the terms interchangeably, however, the Douglas system is not simulcast. Listening to the closest or best site for a location will allow monitoring the whole county. The conventional system is also hard patched to WISCOM.

Mayo Clinic Ambulance, formerly Gold Cross, is the primary transporting EMS provider in the county and uses a combination of ARMER and WISCOM. Their primary ARMER dispatch talkgroup is hard patched to WISCOM.

The southern and eastern portions of the county are covered by other transporting services and the fire departments provide first response county-wide. Primary communications occur on the conventional dispatch channel although WISCOM is often used as well.

 

[JASII]

That is great to know. Thank you. We will be visiting my son at UMD, so I might just leave my Unication G5 on ARMER and catch most of the traffic from both sides of the bridge, then.

I wonder if Mayo Clinic medics have dual-band portables or if they have one on ARMER 800 MHz for Minnesota and one on WISCOM VHF for Wisconsin. For all I know, ARMER might have pretty solid coverage in much/most of Superior and that part of Douglas County. It should be fun listening for me.

On a related note, do you happen to know if Wisconsin State Patrol squads run just a single VHF high band radio or do they run two? With them on WISCOM, I could sort of see them having a second radio just for conventional monitoring. On the other hand, if what they want to monitor is patched, it wouldn't matter.

 

[box23]

That is great to know. Thank you. We will be visiting my son at UMD, so I might just leave my Unication G5 on ARMER and catch most of the traffic from both sides of the bridge, then.

Mayo Ambulance is really the only cross-border traffic you would receive by doing that.

I wonder if Mayo Clinic medics have dual-band portables or if they have one on ARMER 800 MHz for Minnesota and one on WISCOM VHF for Wisconsin. For all I know, ARMER might have pretty solid coverage in much/most of Superior and that part of Douglas County. It should be fun listening for me.

ARMER has excellent coverage throughout the City of Superior and beyond. When they first switched from conventional to ARMER the crews carried single band 800MHz radios. They have since switched to dual-band APX7000 and/or APX8000 portables. Mobiles are also dual-band capable.

On a related note, do you happen to know if Wisconsin State Patrol squads run just a single VHF high band radio or do they run two? With them on WISCOM, I could sort of see them having a second radio just for conventional monitoring. On the other hand, if what they want to monitor is patched, it wouldn't matter.

Generally State Patrol cars have dual radios installed.

 

[JASII]

Just a quick update. My wife and I are in in Superior. When we made it back to the hotel, I turned my Unication G5 onto WISCOM in the Full Spectrum Scan/Talk Group Monitor Mode. It displayed RFSS/Site: 1/72 (Superior tower). The most noticeable thing, to me anyway, was after monitoring the ARMER Duluth simulcast site, WISCOM is not very busy. I am getting Wisconsin State Patrol and others, so it is working very well, but WISCOM is not super active compared to ARMER. It will be interesting to see how WISCOM develops over time.

Also, how common are dual mobile radios in other agencies? For example, does Douglas County Sheriff have dual mobile radios? Or, do they just have a WISCOM radio in their communications center? If it were me, and I only had one conventional, non-trunked radio, I would be inclined to enter all the WISCOM frequencies in the scan list and simply lock out the control channel. I have to imagine that some scanner listeners are doing that now.

 

[sfd119]

I don't believe Douglas has dual band mobile radios but their dispatch center has an ARMER radio if I recall to patch into.

WISCOM doesn't have the amount of users ARMER has. Part of it (in my opinion) was timing....ARMER really took a foothold during the narrowbanding time. ARMER also has portable coverage where as WISCOM was designed for 95% MOBILE coverage. Hopefully WISCOM v2 will change that.

 

[JASII]

So, if the Douglas County Sheriff's Office is working with the Superior Police, what channels/talkgroups do they use?

 

[sfd119]

Superior PD are all on WISCOM and Douglas County SO can switch to WISCOM.