Echols County
Echols is dispatched by Lowndes CO 911 for all calls. They use VHF simplex car/car to talk around but all dispatching is on the Lowndes system. The deputies carry an 800mhx portable.
To call what they were using "a system" is kinda of funny....its only a sheriff and 6 or 7 deputies covering the whole county. If you call 911 during a week night they have to call the deputy at his home...they dont have 24/7 patrol....cell phones dont even work in this county its so rural.
Thanks for the info. This give me a better idea of what they are actually doing down there. What I find funny and somewhat hard to believe is a county in rural Georgia with only a sheriff and six or seven deputies spending somewhere between $2,500 and $4,000 per radio for each deputy, plus are probably paying "user fees" to Lowndes County to be on the 800 MHz Digital System. Oh well, that's rural Georgia for you and nothing seems to amaze me anymore. Kind of reminds me of when I participated in a Statewide Committee back in the early 1990's to review how dispatcher certification should take place in Georgia. In one particular county, which I will not name, an inmate answered the sheriff's department telephone after regular business hours and wrote down information about the type of incident then contacted the deputy "on call" by calling his home phone number. If there was no answer at the deputy's home phone the inmate contacted the deputy via the VHF two-way radio and dispatched the call to him. The inmate served in the role of the dispatcher providing most, if not all, of the regular duties of any full time dispatcher by supporting the requests of the deputy at the scene of a call whether it was calling the Georgia State Patrol to report a motor vehicle accident, calling a wrecker, notifying the fire department, ambulances and even additional deputies as the incident required. In one one other case in a different county, that I also refuse to name, all phone calls to the sheriff's department after normal business hours were put on call forward to the Sheriff's residence. Either the Sheriff or his wife answered the phone calls and he responded to calls from his home with his wife remaining by the radio to provide dispatch support. As you can imagine, situations like this made it a little difficult to come up with a statewide dispatcher certification program, but one was eventually implemented even though the number of training hours were not at the level the committee recommended.
