Pagers? We don't need no stinking pagers.
The tone and voice pagers carried by firefighters will continue, with one heck of an improvement. Radio shop Ron and his crew have come up with a federal grant to improve the tone and voice paging for firefighters. The new set-up will be a five (5) site simulcast system as compared to the three (3) site single-cast system we now have. The coverage maps look awesome.
While this is kinda separate from the MetroSafe radio project, it will be done as a change order. Yesterday I was told they hope to have this up and running by the end of the year. It will be on a new frequency 152 something or another (an abandoned paging channel I believe).
If this got done yesterday it wouldn't be fast enough. Moments ago our department was dispatched to a fire. The pager I have in the basement did not go off, but the one upstairs did. So an improvement in the coverage overlay is more than due and Ron I love ya for that!
I haven't heard anyone promise this yet, but it's pretty much a "no-brainer". I imagine they will patch the VHF dispatch channel (the pager one), to a talkgroup, so what is being said on that dispatch channel will also be heard on that dispatch talkgroup.
I suppose I won't get shot because the papers that I got yesterday were not stamped "Top Secret", but here's an update of the Radio Project:
The remedial tower work at Meidinger, Waverly Hills, Mitchell Hill and the transmitter shop have been completed. I don't know what needed remediating, but whatever it is, it's done.
The Fern Creek station 2 tower, the Manslick site and the MSD Tower sites are complete. The Hopewell site is supposed to be done 8/8. These are the newly constructed towers.
There are four other sites which are co-location deals with cell service providers. There are lawyers involved signing agreements, and as you can expect with lawyers involved, things never move swift (other than their bills).
There was an issue with the original Utica site and they had to come up with another site, so that's led to a slowdown. They hope to have this new site and the four above completed (from a construction standpoint) by the end of this year.
They will be finalizing the radio counts during the months of October, November and December.
The master site renovation is scheduled for completion March of 2009.
They hope to have the fleet-mapping done by March of 2009. (That might be fun).
Acquisition of subscriber equipment (I don't know why they can't just say the portable, mobile and base radios) will start January of 2009.
The radio programming (that might be even more fun) and distribution with begin April of 2009. That will also be when the formal testing begins.
What they are going to do, sounded funny in the beginning, but makes a lot of sense when I think it through, is issue the public service people their radios first. So they will be the proverbial canary in the mine. I'd rather have them discover a flaw instead of public safety.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
