Non ARMER Counties/Interop Participant

[JASII]

Is there a list somewhere here on Radio Reference that lists what counties are non-participants and/or interop participants only? I did find this Allied Radio Matrix for Emergency Response (ARMER) - The RadioReference Wiki and I noticed that Waseca, Mower, and Pipestone Counties look like the only remaining southern Minnesota counties that are not on ARMER. It looks like the rest are in northern Minnesota.

Is anybody here monitoring Waseca County? I would imagine that at some point they will switch, but they are just waiting for a while longer.

Are there any remaining counties that have expressed NO desire to switch? I would imagine that at some point everyone will switch, but in the meantime I guess we still need to have VHF in place to communicate with those users that haven't switched yet.

I also wonder if that means the State Patrol still has VHF mobiles in ALL of their cars or if they have removed them? Granted, even if they have switched it might be nice to monitor the local SO on a Motorola rather than a scanner. It does look like most have their VHF law main patched to ARMER. That makes it easy to scan on an ARMER radio, but maybe they still would want to scan VHF for the other channels.

 

[fwfdengine2]

Is anybody here monitoring Waseca County? I would imagine that at some point they will switch, but they are just waiting for a while longer.

I am located in Waseca County. I monitor them 24/7. The plan right now is to switch over in 2015-2017. The county has been granted 31 ARMER talkgroups. Each agency is going to be receiving 2 APX7000's for interop. The county has had the APX7000's sitting in the sheriffs office for over a year but they can't be handed out until training is complete/there is some programming permissions left to get. But as of now they are operating conventionally with their new MCC7500 consoles and the Orbacom's are long gone.

fwfdengine2

 

[kb0uxv]

Here is a link to the latest participation update from the ARMER website. It is updated every month.

https://dps.mn.gov/divisions/ecn/programs/armer/Documents/ARMER Participation Map and List.pdf

 

[mmtstc]

Pipestone is the only county the isn't NFM compliant, and is in violation oof the FCC mandate, but they should eb online any day now from what I have read. Mower and Waseca county are already using NFM, so they can hold out *** long as they please, but in the interest of interoperability, they will mgrate as time and grant monies allow. Northwestern Minnesota is coming around, but in all honesty, VHF is the best option up there anyways, which is why you see the holdout counties up there running on P25 conventional VHF. Federal LE operations and North Dakota is all VHF, which makes it easier to be interoperable across the border.