MadSpleen85
Member
Switch has not happened at this point. Leawood Fire appears to be working a training exercise on their Digital Talkgroup 31210. Had heavy fire then a brief May Day activation.
It will be interesting to see how JOCO does station tone-outs once the new system comes online. Will each fire station have it's own separate talkgroup, or will everything be dispatched from a single one? I think KCK does it both ways, so perhaps Johnson County will do something similar?
My understanding is that they will be using the Locution system over the radio for station alerting but still support the VHF paging (for now). Apparently, at some point in the near future, they will migrate away from tone and voice completely going to alpha-numeric pagers controlled by the computer aided dispatch system. The dispatcher will put in the address and type of call, the computer will suggest a response from available unit, the dispatcher can amend or approve the responding units and the computer system will take over alerting units from there. Sounds good in theory- will be interesting to see it function in the real world.
Seems like the Fire & EMS switchover is going OK so far, however, I noticed that the audio quality was a bit iffy this afternoon in the Downtown Olathe area. Appears they are still using 154.250 for station alerts.
Sounds the same up north in Shawnee. Audio seems to fade in and out. Voice is not as clear as the analog system was, in my opinion. On this system the voices seem to sound similar to each other, harder to tell the dispatchers from the units out in the field. Going to take some getting used to.
Does seem to have been some minor but noticeable improvement since the roll call and initial switch over this morning, in audio quality.
This new Johnson County P25 700 MHz system doesn’t work nearly as well as the old system. I monitor it over here in Lawrence and most of the time the signals are nothing more than a bunch of garble. Very seldom can you understand what they are saying as the signal is to weak. Hope that this doesn’t endanger our Police Officers and Fireman over there!
Skinny