Nice thought, yet I hear it every day. Even the occasional OSP.
MARCS Steering Committee Meeting 12/22/2020
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Nice thought, yet I hear it every day. Even the occasional OSP.
Why should the chief be disciplined or fired? The public has no specific right to monitor their radio traffic.
Not quite how it works.... Information is given over the air all the time. The probem here is: Streaming. Any clown can pull it up on their phone and hear any thing. At least with having a physical scanner, it take half a brain to program. And typically, actual scanner users aren't spouting off at the mouth with information they hear over the radio....
You're in Fayette County, right? Sounds like what happened there.
Equipment has always been required to meet NFPA 72, 1221 and now UL2524. Factory training has been a requirement for several years with a soon coming NICET cert going to be the standard. This will all go away at some point. Many departments are looking to in-band repeating equipment on the apparatus itself and using a designated direct channel. Columbus is looking into this. There are several departments already doing this even around the county. The reason is as a PS user you have no guarantee that when you walk in that building that the BDA is even working. All the units my company has designed and installed the building owner does not pursue the required testing at all.
ohiodesperado
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Oh I know what you are saying. We have one jurisdiction that do the yearly tests. And the reason that happens is the inspector sat down and ask what does the code say and what does the building owner have responsibility for. ANd we reviewed the code and yearly tests and batteries every 3 years are part of the requirements. So the fire inspector tells the owners that this is part of their yearly inspection (required due to manufacturing environment). The rest of them get it installed to get their occupancy permit and quickly forget it's there. Now I have been hearing that they are gonna look at requiring cell coverage as well because of 911 and the lack of landline phones. When that comes into effect, that will be it for me doing them. Too much stuff involved in trying 4 cell carriers together and PS in one system that stretches a large building. The simple math for designing 700/800 systems that are cable and not fiber based are fine by me. And it's not our primary business anyway.
Ad far as inband repeaters. They CAN work in certain instances, but are not the do all end all devices that they are being touted as. Case in point was the court house. An inband repeater in a truck outside of that building would have had little effect on their coverage issues. I have been in all metal buildings that only had small windows that were not low-E and had more signal than right at the windows of a building that was mostly all low-E glass and closer to the transmit site and the signal was not only too low for the regulation at -95 dbm but was not usable -115dbm, right above the noise floor. I think that will be a path that some will go. I have seen customers buy them for fire depts trying to eliminate the cost of doing a DAS due to specific building structure requirements and limitations (building was on National Historic Registry). I have come up with some pretty inventive ways to deal with some of that through the years hiding antennas and line in the structure during the rehab, since drywall has almost no attenuation to the signal) but those buildings do of course present a unique set of hurdles to get past.
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