Mount Holly agrees to pay nearly $17,000 per year to improve radio reception

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Thunderbolt

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MOUNT HOLLY, NC - Police and rescue workers are no longer stuck with a radio system better suited to Plymouth Rock.

City leaders agreed to share an 800-megahertz radio communications network with Charlotte, Gastonia and Belmont. The Mount Holly City Council unanimously approved a contract between the cities Monday night after agreeing in principle to the arrangement at a work session last month.

"It's going to be state of the art," said Councilman Jerry Bishop. "The one we've got now probably came over on the ark - or the Mayflower, rather."

All quips aside, the city's old radio system had serious flaws. Police Chief David Belk said communicating with officers in northern Mount Holly was often difficult, and the new system eliminates most radio dead zones.

"The 800 (MHz.) trunking system gives us 90-something-percent coverage," Belk said. "With the old one, on the north end, I bet it's 50-50."

Mount Holly will pay $16,581 per year to maintain the 800-MHz. radio infrastructure, according to city data. Belmont will pay $20,370 and Gastonia's share will be $89,792.

The contract creates a Radio Communications Council to oversee development of communications technology for the partner cities. Mount Holly could leave the partnership after giving two years' notice.

Charlotte and Mecklenburg County have the eight primary Simulcast radio towers. Gastonia joined the system and is recruiting other Gaston County municipalities to share the infrastructure and maintenance costs.

http://www.gastongazette.com/news/city_22665___article.html/holly_mount.html
 

bonus1331

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I think we're pretty lucky here in Charlotte.
No digital or encryption to worry about with relatively good coverage across the area.
Living in Union County; I would have no problem if this County joined the Char-Meck system.
No more missing comms due to fireground simplex calls. The SO comes in strong, but Monroe PD has a very weak signal.
 

Grog

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As far as trunked systems go, char/meck is about as good as you can get (after the nexhell interference leaves it'll be better) but trunking is not the answer for everyone. No digital, simlucast to all sites, not having to program different frequencies for different sites, just all around 800mhz analog fun.


As far as Gaston County users, all I see is the PDs of Gastonia, Belmont & Mt Holly switching to the 800 system. All the fire departments operate on the county VHF repeater system (Gastonia has their own, but they do switch back and forth quite often) so you will not gain any police to fire abilities to talk with each other just as they don;t have it now.

Mt Holly and Belmont has very little traffic and a simple UHF system is more than good enough for the amount of traffic they have. If they have coverage issues, they can be fixed instead of having to spend the money to buy all new radios and consoles (as they both run their own dispatch center).

Belmont and Mt Holly are also next to each other, so if they will have each others TGs programmed, that could come in handy. They will loose all simple means to talk with other departments such as Stanly and the county, Gastonia will not be able to talk with everyone who surrounds them (Ranlo, Lowell & Cramerton) so they will have to depend on patches that will "hopefully" work.

Gastonia has three police repeaters as well as the mutual aid repeater, I rarely hear them using all three except when they are using CH 3 for surveillance which they also have a simplex frequency available for such uses. I'm just glad I dumped my HT1000 for listening to the city, it is not feasible to use a scanner that much at work because of the ruggednesses issue, hence the reason I loved the HT1000 and my sabers :D
 

Grog

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No more missing comms due to fireground simplex calls.


As a scanner listener, I like being able to hear fireground comms.


As someone who used to do that for real, there is no way I would want to use anything but simplex for any fireground ops (trunked or conventional). I won't even get into the digital fireground comms issues others are having across the country that hopefully will not be implemented here for quite some time.
 
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