GATRRS Western Counties Project

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Austin51246e

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All public safety agencies in Burnet, Llano, and Blanco counties will be live on this P25 VHF extension off the GATRRS switch in Austin no later than August 2013. All hardware and infrastructure has been completed and templates are in the process of being created. This project was expedited following the severe interop deficiencies during the labor day fires.
 
texasemt13

texasemt13

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Good info and thank you for it. Unfortunately, we do not have many active members from Blanco, Burnet or Llano counties. Any other information you can provide would really help our database out. In fact, our database has no identified GATRRS sites in either of these counties, so it looks like we could use some help identifying those as well as the talkgroups they'll be issued.

Thanks so much for your contribution and welcome to Radio Reference.
 
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nd5y

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I remember a while back seeing a bunch of Part 22 paging licenses issued to Burnet County.

They have 17 licenses on the 152/158 MHz paging blocks with the consecutive callsigns of WQKS686 through WQKS702 and are probably used for this system.
 
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SCPD

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I was sitting in Stormy's (hamburger joint in Burnet) digging out Opensky channels a year ago. Didn't think to search VHF.
 
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nd5y

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Russell said:
That did work. How do they determine which freqs to use when licensing segments like this?
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I don't know. Each block is 30 kHz wide. You could easily fit two P25 signals and probably three in a block (maybe not at the same site). As far as I know you can use any frequency in a block at any location in the market area and don't have to license individual frequencies at each site like you have to do with normal Part 90 licenses. I don't know if there is a frequency coordinator for paging frequencies or how they handle interference to/from outside of the market area. Parker County used the center frequency in each block. I think I remember looking at South Dakota or Nebraska or some other state that built a statewide VHF P25 system that used some Part 22 frequencies and they did it differently.

There may be more information on this system on license application attachments or on the regional council of governments web site for that area.
 
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SCPD

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nd5y said:
I think I remember looking at South Dakota or Nebraska or some other state that built a statewide VHF P25 system that used some Part 22 frequencies and they did it differently.
Click to expand...

South Dakota - it was an Omnilink system I think.
 
loumaag

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Unitrunker said:
South Dakota - it was an Omnilink system I think.
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Not an Omnilink, but large nonetheless. It used a combination of PS 150 MHz along with paging and marine channels. Another interesting thing about it was that it used dynamically assigned input frequencies. In other words, the repeater pair was not always the same pair, I have no idea how they did it, separate receivers and transmitters maybe.
 
rbarker

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I have a friend who lives in Marble Falls with scanners. He said:
It would be Utterly stupid to "test" the system for almost a year (warranties on the equipment run out, etc.)
Most agencies don't have the P25 trunking equipment or the money to purchase them.
I don't see this happening by the end of 8/2013.
 
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Wes

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I've been told that the current VHF frequencies/radios will be narrow-banded by the end of 2012 and then they'll work on the VHF trunked system after that.
 
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Austin51246e

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Back as early as 2006, CAPCOG wanted to attempt to have all of their members on the same radio system, in this case: GATRRS. Williamson County had the available funding at the time and supplemented it with grants to be one of the first. Caldwell, Bastrop, and Lee counties went live a few years later and were built together on one grant. Western counties (Burnet, Llano, Blanco) had geographical problem when it came to implementing 800mhz sites. It would have cost an insane amount of money to build enough 800 sites among the 3 to cover with the unique terrain. A VHF layer was chosen over an LCRA option in 2008. Most agencies in the region have upgraded mobiles and portables to Moto's to be ready. Some of which are APX dual bands that have Austin talkgroups already on them. Tentatively, road and bridge will be the guinea pigs as early as March for diagnosing the bugs. Encryption at this point is unlikely. Talkgroup tags and templates are still being discussed and planned weekly. There are also hopes for having the three counties build a combined or consolidated EOC/Com Center within 5 years.
 
texasemt13

texasemt13

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Austin51246e said:
A VHF layer was chosen over an LCRA option in 2008. Most agencies in the region have upgraded mobiles and portables to Moto's to be ready. Some of which are APX dual bands that have Austin talkgroups already on them. Tentatively, road and bridge will be the guinea pigs as early as March for diagnosing the bugs. Encryption at this point is unlikely. Talkgroup tags and templates are still being discussed and planned weekly. There are also hopes for having the three counties build a combined or consolidated EOC/Com Center within 5 years.
Click to expand...

Great info.
 
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