Mercer County TRS

[station32]

Mercer County fire communications will be moving to the county P25 Phase I system. The only coms on the system will be when the trucks are responding and command to county all fire-ground communications will be UHF analog simplex. As of right now it appears paging will be on VHF 154.430 narrow band. This should be taking place by the end of the summer 2012. Any one have anything else to add or any questions?

 

[Rich_Galvan]

The VHF paging ; 2-tone or MDC?

 

[wnjl]

Is EMS moving there too?

 

[station32]

The paging will stay two tone as it is now. And eventually county dispatch will be absorbing EMS and police dispatching. And the way it sounds right now ewings system will be building another site in hopewell and than the county will be absorbing both sites on the system. All other sites will be using same freqs as the sites that are up now in lawrence and hightstown

 

[jetskiman98]

Just a follow up to what Station 32 said, The Mercer County Radio Interoperability Project Committee had a meeting this past Friday (12/16/11) and discussed the new system. The target launch date is January 1, 2013. All municipalities are welcomed to join the network, however it is not required. Patches will be set up for users as they move over. Police, Fire, and EMS along with county and municipal departments will be on the system. However, agencies will continue to maintain their own communications centers. PDs will still have their own dispatchers and Mercer Central and Lifecomm will remain where they are at. (Side note, I did hear a rumor the other day that said Lifecomm is looking at moving off of Prospect Street to a new location.)

Paging for Fire and EMS will remain on the VHF frequencies as they are now. EMS will still be required to have VHF radios in their rigs due to DOH requirements. At the meeting it was unknown if EMS operations would be moved to the trunk system or stay on the VHF Lifecomm Ops. The meeting was mainly about the time frame and how users can purchase equipment.

Speaking of VHF, the county also filed a petition with the FCC to defer the narrow banding requirement. I didn't catch for how long. This will help users purchase the new UHF digital radios and not have to worry about upgrading or purchasing narrow band complaint radios in the meantime before the system is operational. This also will help with paging.

That's all I have for now, I'll post more when I hear it. So far no talk of how the talk groups will be set up.

 

[phillydjdan]

Thank you for the update. I sometimes travel to that area, and I am anticipating the implementation of this system. Any idea how the channels (talkgroups) are going to be arranged or structured? What I mean by that, is will the police departments all have their own channel, will fire operations be split into sectors like it is now, will there be tactical channels, etc? Just curious about how they are gonna set everything up.

 

[AngerManagement]

Update????

Anyone have an update as to when this will all happen? I was listening to a live feed today and it is atrocious. I am not talking about the quality of the feed. Communications for Fire, EMS, & Police should really all be conducted from one center.

 

[AngerManagement]

Any Updates?

It has been 2 months since my post & almost 2 years since this project was mentioned in an earlier post.

 

[phillydjdan]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:23.0) Gecko/23.0 Firefox/23.0)

I have not heard anything. It seems as though this project has stalled from the looks of things.

 

[robbinsj2]

It's been around a lot longer than two years -- I think it's now close to 4-5 since a control channel went live. In any event it is moving forward, at a seeming glacial rate to date but I know some are confident it will pick up a lot of speed soon.

I don't know if financing is playing a role but I do see them getting their ducks in a row -- the Ewing and Hopewell licenses were recently transferred to County and they're working on consolidating those frequencies and subscriber counts to the main license; and they took out some conventional licenses which I think may be for the regional fire ops channels which I have heard about.

Being from Middlesex County, where there is almost one dispatch center for every single town and nine different local/county government trunked systems (not including OpenSky), I admire what central dispatch has been in place in Mercer for quite some time now. There's room for further consolidation but it's far from the worst in the area.

 

[phillydjdan]

Aren't some of the police departments self-dispatched? If that's the case, the hold up could be convincing them to join the county or something like that. I know Trenton said they are committing to UHF, so I imagine they mean the county TRS. Either way they need to crap or get off the pot, as this system will be obsolete before anyone even uses it lol.

 

[robbinsj2]

Off the top of my head all but one of the police departments are self-dispatched, but that wouldn't hold up construction of the system. They could continue to self-dispatch on their current channel(s), or move to the trunked system (when it is ready) and self-dispatch there.

I'm curious about Trenton and UHF -- the only thing I've seen on that was the one article which was posted here about new Kenwood radios, and it included a comment that the county system wouldn't have the capacity to accommodate Trenton. The article doesn't even say UHF, as best I can tell that seems to be inferred based upon some interoperability discussion or some other knowledge of the poster.

 

[phillydjdan]

http://forums.radioreference.com/new-jersey-radio-discussion-forum/262181-trenton-going-uhf.html

 

[dahlio]

Just realized, 1049 is a talkgroup that popped up midday on the 15th. Not sure if thats anything of substance...

 

[jetskiman98]

Slooooooow.

The project is moving excruciatingly slow. All of the new radios (for fire) have been purchased. They were purchased through an AFG grant. All the equipment is just waiting to be used. As for the actual system, no one really knows. The turn on date keeps getting pushed back and back. I spoke with a tech from a local radio shop who is doing a lot of the installs and programming, and he told me they just came up with the conventional fireground frequencies. Unfortunately, I do not have them yet.

 

[phillydjdan]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:23.0) Gecko/23.0 Firefox/23.0)

maybe they are having buyer's remorse, since burlington and bucks are in the process of moving from 500 to 700 MHz lol

 

[AngerManagement]

LOL! Buyers remorse. Ok, thanks for the replies. I was begining to wonder if this was all swept under the rug. Good to know there is still some movement. I know Atlantic County still has some towns that still self dispatch Fire & Police. I just think one communications center answering & dispatching 911 would benefit the communities especially when it comes to mutual aid. You would think this day and age consolidation would be cheaper and easier in the long run.

 

[jetskiman98]

Word on the street is that Cassidian is town working on the new system. The optimists think it will be online for testing in January and in service by the end of February.

 

[CaptDan]

Trenton is staying right where it currently is 800 Mhz Trunked. They will also be maintaining their own dispatch in the current plans.

 

[carbineone]

CaptDan are you talking about just fire? The reason I ask is the VSELP on police is not going to be supported by Motorola.