The Elmer School Road site would really improve coverage along the Potomac River plus very good coverage into Virginia around Leesburg for Virginia State PD and local Fire Dept in coordination with Montgomery and or Fredrick County on any Potomac River Rescues plus it would allow FairFax County to be on it and since Fairfax is the county to contact first for any River Rescue then they pass it along to Montgomery who has primary jurisdiction for all rescues until they reach the DC line.
Actually the tower for Patapsco Valley State Park will be located on the Baltimore County side, in the Hilton Area.
Edit: I know you were just quoting the document.
I think the testimony document confused the location of the site (a DNR maintenance area on the Baltimore County side) and the desire of Howard County officials to collocate equipment at the new site to support their system.
Kent Law Dispatch seems to be fully encrypted now. Everything was encrypted when I listened to the talkgroup this afternoon. Previously dispatch was in the clear but units were encrypted.
They are completely encrypted now, the Dispatcher was in the clear was only while they had the implementation period for encryption, so allied agencies could hear if they hadn't made the switch.
I've been out West for a few weeks, but I just noticed that the Howard Wastewater ASR is offline since 28 FEB according to control channel data broadcast on the Anne Arundel site. Perhaps they have consolidated the ASR site into the Howard Simulcast site?
Lancaster County, PA requesting to be an Interop User at the Radio Control Board Meeting tomorrow.
Chris52
Member
Interesting, has York or any of the other broader line counties followed suit ?
Chester County FD/EMS units are already on the system, they have 815xxxx RID's and are seen on Cecil Co. TG's occasionally.
Not sure about York. I do know that Adams County, Somerset County, & Chester County have been approved. Counties in VA, WV, and DE have also been approved as did the District of Columbia.
Notes from today's RCB meeting in Crownsville.
Side note: WAGIN is still a thing as one of their reps is on the RCB board - I thought that entity was sunsetted when FIRST came along.
The big news is of course the "go live" date of Zone 5 / NCR / SOMD counties. The staff is confident the date will remain 19 April as LMR and backhaul testing is complete, and all sites are on the air and burning in. There are even a few users allowed on sites to create a bit of a load, and there will be a regional test prior to air with DoIT, SHA and Talbot County participating. The Gov will mark the debut with a connectivity demonstration at City Dock with ten or so "radio checks" with field units located across the state. Potential remote sites mentioned were Deep Creek, Crisfield, Ocean City, Point Lookout. Feel free to respond with others as the event is in the planning stages and they do read this forum, lol. I suggest Great Falls.
Lancaster County Interoperability User approved. Several fire companies in southern Lancaster want to purchase 700 / 800 radios to coordinate mutual aid responses in Maryland, primarily Harford and Cecil counties. 6 - 12 radios to start, more likely later. I assume they will also ask CMARC / Harford for permission to affiliate with their system.
The $18M Capital Budget request process went smoothly. The funding covers four new sites, $1M for BDAs in schools in the Primary User counties and hardening of backhaul infrastructure.
30K Primary Users and 65K Interoperability Users.
There were some bonks during the early Winter related to rebooting switches at various sites as Motorola had firmware updates to apply related to other upgrades. Each site has two switches and the channel load is dived in half.
Future sites: (Coverage improvement sites are sited based on user feedback)
Swallow Falls - plans to get civil work underway in preparation of site equipment delivery. There are supply chain issues that will delay construction. Go live is now planned for Winter (not sure if 2023 or 2024 as the shelter won't be delivered until November.
Greenbriar BDA - A first for FIRST. The staff is actually excited to see how this solution will work out. The donor antenna is up on a hill, and the site is down in the bowl. Not sure how the two bits of infrastructure will be connected. They mentioned a company called Skyline - maybe it's these guys:
Davidsonville - This is a newly constructed site for Anne Arundel's new system, so clean and accessible. They expect the FIRST site equipment to be operational by July as a subsite of the Anne Arundel simulcast.
Cumberland - This is going to support the city; I suppose to lessen reliance on DVRS. Perhaps the site will be at their ECC?
Patapsco State Park - Proposed to improve coverage in the Patapsco River Valley. Construction to start in July. Awaiting approvals from the Feds (FAA, DOI Tribal Lands?) Physical location in Baltimore County but will be part of the Howard cell.
Queenstown - This will alleviate the tendency for radios to constantly switch between sites in the area (Queen Anne, Matapeake and Talbot.) One of the staff stated that if you move only a few feet, the subscriber unit will switch to a different site; move a few more feet, and it will switch again. They want to make one site dominant. SHA land in the 50/301 split area.
Elmer School Road - commercial tower site used by Montgomery County's new system. Proposed to improve coverage in the Potomac River Valley. Side note: current coverage is provided by the Marlu Ridge ASR which is a Zone 1 site in Frederick County, constructed in Phase 3, and paid for with Phase 5 funding.
DC / NCR sites - this is beginning to sound like a simulcast site with at least three tower sites with two in DC and one in Arlington. Funding and mx details are being worked out, but since this a multijurisdictional effort, it might take a while, lol.
Howard Waste Treatment Plant ASR is now part of the Howard cell. The next phase of the project is to raise and changeout / reorient antennas. This should correct coverage problems in Laurel discovered during Phase 5 testing.
Klej Grange - Antenna raising and changeout to omnis corrected the coverage and simulcast distortion issues in southeastern Worcester County. Coverage prediction maps clearly show the improvement. This illustrates that antenna projects can sometimes solve coverage issues.
Smart Connect / Critical Connect project: About 1/3 (aka newer) of state radios can utilize Smart Connect WiFi connectivity. Smart Connect cellular connectivity with subscribers would require new radios. Motorola is currently installing a pilot rollout of Critical Connect which should be live by the end of April. The staff seem excited about the capabilities it will offer, particularly in linking disparate systems together "in the cloud" rather than dedicated hardware. Part of the explanation used an example from a previous national event in DC. Coast Guard Sector MDNCR (SCC Curtis Bay) wanted comms with their and DNR's small boats on the Potomac River. A physical link was set up to interface with FIRST. The field units operated on a DC system talk group that had a node set up in College Park where consolettes bridged the talk group into a DNR talk group and injected into FIRST backhaul. SCC could then use a FIRST radio to communicate on the DNR tg. With Critical Connect, the systems could be linked in the cloud, not involving any RF. I'm assuming that the "cloud" is the Motorola mothership.
A major topic revolved around sources of interference which were originally thought to be a local issue, but Motorola and others have indicated is a widespread problem with deployed 700 MHz systems: adjacent channel interference from Band 13 (Verizon uplink) and Band 14 (FirstNet downlink). This is going to be an issue going forward, not unlike the Nextel issue that resulted in a many-years rebanding adventure.
A long description of the various techniques used to support redundancy and resiliency - I wish that I had the slide deck. The biggest cause of site failure is loss of power and failure of transfer switches. The backhaul network is solid: two paths to most sites; redundant switches and other site equipment. Entire simulcast sites can go down, but with robust coverage overlap, in most cases users wouldn't notice it. If a site loses connectivity with the core, it goes into site trunking. The subscribers are configured to favor wide-area trunking vs. site trunking, so the radio is likely to select an adjacent site still connected to the core.
System details as of today: 159 RF sites; 50 logical sites consisting of 22 simulcast sites and 28 ASRs; the Baltimore site is the largest in terms of RF sites: 14.
Side note: WAGIN is still a thing as one of their reps is on the RCB board - I thought that entity was sunsetted when FIRST came along.
The big news is of course the "go live" date of Zone 5 / NCR / SOMD counties. The staff is confident the date will remain 19 April as LMR and backhaul testing is complete, and all sites are on the air and burning in. There are even a few users allowed on sites to create a bit of a load, and there will be a regional test prior to air with DoIT, SHA and Talbot County participating. The Gov will mark the debut with a connectivity demonstration at City Dock with ten or so "radio checks" with field units located across the state. Potential remote sites mentioned were Deep Creek, Crisfield, Ocean City, Point Lookout. Feel free to respond with others as the event is in the planning stages and they do read this forum, lol. I suggest Great Falls.
Lancaster County Interoperability User approved. Several fire companies in southern Lancaster want to purchase 700 / 800 radios to coordinate mutual aid responses in Maryland, primarily Harford and Cecil counties. 6 - 12 radios to start, more likely later. I assume they will also ask CMARC / Harford for permission to affiliate with their system.
The $18M Capital Budget request process went smoothly. The funding covers four new sites, $1M for BDAs in schools in the Primary User counties and hardening of backhaul infrastructure.
30K Primary Users and 65K Interoperability Users.
There were some bonks during the early Winter related to rebooting switches at various sites as Motorola had firmware updates to apply related to other upgrades. Each site has two switches and the channel load is dived in half.
Future sites: (Coverage improvement sites are sited based on user feedback)
Swallow Falls - plans to get civil work underway in preparation of site equipment delivery. There are supply chain issues that will delay construction. Go live is now planned for Winter (not sure if 2023 or 2024 as the shelter won't be delivered until November.
Greenbriar BDA - A first for FIRST. The staff is actually excited to see how this solution will work out. The donor antenna is up on a hill, and the site is down in the bowl. Not sure how the two bits of infrastructure will be connected. They mentioned a company called Skyline - maybe it's these guys:
Public Safety Distributed Antenna System (DAS) - Skyline
We design and install ERRS, Emergency Responder Radio Systems, commonly known as DAS. These are required in larger facilities to enable radio communication.
skylinecommunications.net
Davidsonville - This is a newly constructed site for Anne Arundel's new system, so clean and accessible. They expect the FIRST site equipment to be operational by July as a subsite of the Anne Arundel simulcast.
Cumberland - This is going to support the city; I suppose to lessen reliance on DVRS. Perhaps the site will be at their ECC?
Patapsco State Park - Proposed to improve coverage in the Patapsco River Valley. Construction to start in July. Awaiting approvals from the Feds (FAA, DOI Tribal Lands?) Physical location in Baltimore County but will be part of the Howard cell.
Queenstown - This will alleviate the tendency for radios to constantly switch between sites in the area (Queen Anne, Matapeake and Talbot.) One of the staff stated that if you move only a few feet, the subscriber unit will switch to a different site; move a few more feet, and it will switch again. They want to make one site dominant. SHA land in the 50/301 split area.
Elmer School Road - commercial tower site used by Montgomery County's new system. Proposed to improve coverage in the Potomac River Valley. Side note: current coverage is provided by the Marlu Ridge ASR which is a Zone 1 site in Frederick County, constructed in Phase 3, and paid for with Phase 5 funding.
DC / NCR sites - this is beginning to sound like a simulcast site with at least three tower sites with two in DC and one in Arlington. Funding and mx details are being worked out, but since this a multijurisdictional effort, it might take a while, lol.
Howard Waste Treatment Plant ASR is now part of the Howard cell. The next phase of the project is to raise and changeout / reorient antennas. This should correct coverage problems in Laurel discovered during Phase 5 testing.
Klej Grange - Antenna raising and changeout to omnis corrected the coverage and simulcast distortion issues in southeastern Worcester County. Coverage prediction maps clearly show the improvement. This illustrates that antenna projects can sometimes solve coverage issues.
Smart Connect / Critical Connect project: About 1/3 (aka newer) of state radios can utilize Smart Connect WiFi connectivity. Smart Connect cellular connectivity with subscribers would require new radios. Motorola is currently installing a pilot rollout of Critical Connect which should be live by the end of April. The staff seem excited about the capabilities it will offer, particularly in linking disparate systems together "in the cloud" rather than dedicated hardware. Part of the explanation used an example from a previous national event in DC. Coast Guard Sector MDNCR (SCC Curtis Bay) wanted comms with their and DNR's small boats on the Potomac River. A physical link was set up to interface with FIRST. The field units operated on a DC system talk group that had a node set up in College Park where consolettes bridged the talk group into a DNR talk group and injected into FIRST backhaul. SCC could then use a FIRST radio to communicate on the DNR tg. With Critical Connect, the systems could be linked in the cloud, not involving any RF. I'm assuming that the "cloud" is the Motorola mothership.
A major topic revolved around sources of interference which were originally thought to be a local issue, but Motorola and others have indicated is a widespread problem with deployed 700 MHz systems: adjacent channel interference from Band 13 (Verizon uplink) and Band 14 (FirstNet downlink). This is going to be an issue going forward, not unlike the Nextel issue that resulted in a many-years rebanding adventure.
A long description of the various techniques used to support redundancy and resiliency - I wish that I had the slide deck. The biggest cause of site failure is loss of power and failure of transfer switches. The backhaul network is solid: two paths to most sites; redundant switches and other site equipment. Entire simulcast sites can go down, but with robust coverage overlap, in most cases users wouldn't notice it. If a site loses connectivity with the core, it goes into site trunking. The subscribers are configured to favor wide-area trunking vs. site trunking, so the radio is likely to select an adjacent site still connected to the core.
System details as of today: 159 RF sites; 50 logical sites consisting of 22 simulcast sites and 28 ASRs; the Baltimore site is the largest in terms of RF sites: 14.
tvengr
Well Known Member
I see that Waste Treatment ASR is still listed in the RR database. Should the Howard Simulcast site now be used in its place?
ssinglet
Member
or it is the "PG the Bus" from the PG trunked system, they have been very active today picking up and dropping people off.
The wastewater site is now history so the site can be removed from device programming. Ill send a note to the rrdb peeps.
tvengr
Well Known Member
Thank you! The Maryland Transit Administration Motorola Type II Smartnet system has been removed from the database now that the system is history also and all MTA radio traffic is now on FIRST.
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The TGs were 8365, 8367, and 8368. On my way home from work I also picked up transmissions from the same TGs on the following sites.
Charles County Simulcast
St Mary’s Simulcast
Nice Bridge ASR
Those are FIRST tgs for MTA Mobility, so def not The Bus. Somebody actually hosts them as a stream on Broadcastify. Since MTA provides some level of service in Charles County, it makes sense that those talk groups can be heard on Nice Bridge ASR and STMC as they are adjacent sites to the Charles simulcast sites.
ssinglet
Member
for some reason my Uniden BCD436HP was not showing the correct TG as in the database it just showed the TG number.
