MARCS Dependability And Compartmentalization

[grumpy_hermit]

Since all of the public service agencies in my county (Allen) are/will soon be dependent on MARCS, I've been wondering about the wisdom of putting all of our communication eggs in one basket. How is MARCS set up to avoid a catastrophic failure if our local tower or some other major component goes down/fails? Is there even a remote chance that we could have a total (MARCS) blackout? If so, then what? Prior to MARCS, units could still communicate directly, albeit less effectively, without going through a repeater. Isn't that now impossible?

 

[AMDXP]

I'm fairly certain they can fail over to VHF if necessary.

Keep in mind any one county (read most of the time) is covered by more than one tower.

For instance Hancock county is covered by 2 Putnam County sites, 1 Wyandot County Site, and the Lima site covers the southern portion of the county.

The Findlay site covers a least half, if not 3/4 of Allen County from my own experiences.

It would take some sort of of major catastrophic failure.....say and EMP to disable that many towers at once.

 

[cfr301]

MARC's has a mobile Tower Site that CAN be used, and HAS been tested already in Bowling Green after a storm took out a tower up there. Its a fairly reliable system with backups in place but any can happen to wipeout a section of this computer oriented system. I think there are some VHF backup abilities just in case.

 

[mdulrich]

With the redundancy and backups in place with MARCS it exceeds anything the local agencies have in place. While MARCS may (and has in the past) lose network capabilities to connect statewide, the individual sites will continue to function in site trunking mode. If that fails the sites will go into conventional repeater mode that will allow communications. If all that fails, there are conventional simplex frequencies programmed into the MARCS radios that will still allow communications.

MARCS has a lot of baskets.

Mike

 

[grumpy_hermit]

MARCS has a lot of baskets.

That's good to know. I wasn't aware of the conventional simplex capabilities.