North Fulton Radio System

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MTS2000des

5B2_BEE00 Czar
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MTS2000des

Everyone has opinions but I tend to base mine on fact.

FACT 1- The County system has gone off the air over 10 times since January 2013. HVAC at the prime site has been a cause 3 of those times. Even County personnel admit that when the system finally scrams after an over heating issue, something usually fails at the time or soon thereafter. Cooked boards, damaged tubes etc .I DO NOT blame the people that work very hard at the County 911 that try to keep this system running for our daily use.The County buildings department is responsible for the maintenance of the facilities at the sites. In other words the same guys that fix toilets at the jail are also responsible for the HVAC at the sites. EVERY site has two AC units that run in parallel to avoid ever losing total HVAC at a site. Ask yourself how this could be allowed to happen.

FACT 2- IT SHOULD NEVER GO DOWN AND THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE

FACT 3- Several of the North Fulton cities have had backup repeaters in place for years. The newer cities have had NO backup until two years ago when we were able to use UASI as a backup

FACT-4 When the original County system was brought online, there were only two cities north of the Atlanta city limits, I can speak for the first city to join at a cost of $1,474,000.00 It is public record, look it up. That city licensed and purchased two channels and associated backbone equipment to add to the County system. Something else you may not know, The original County system was paid for with GENERAL funds, meaning that all County Taxpayers paid for the original system, not local public safety funds. Speaking for those two cities, we were NEVER approached by the County for ANY upgrades until 4 years ago when Fulton decided to charger a subscriber fee, which has been paid per radio ever since. As far as I know any recent upgrades to the County system were as a result of UASI grants.

FACT-5 We are working VERY closely with Fulton County to consolidate/share resources wherever possible.

30319

Encryption has been part of the original desiggn since the beginning of the project. That being said, the present plan is to only encrypt high risk, specialized talkgroups. Many of the smaller talkgroups will also be TDMA from the beginning with all of the system on TDMA by 2017

Systems do go down. Our county system has had two failures this year that I am aware of, one was when a zone controller was reset and files reloaded during a merge of talkgroups from Forsyth county- the other was for some unknown reason. Both instances were short in duration.

Failures CAN happen. I agree that downtime should NOT, but no system is 100 percent 100 percent of the time. This is why an independent BACKUP should be in every radio, and users KNOW how to revert without some of the "what channel is that?".

The upgrades you speak of were NOT completely paid for by UASI grants. UASI money covered some of the replacement XTS/XTL subscriber radios- but not all- and the 2003 core upgrade came right out of the county till.

In 1999, the county ASKED your city to pony up to rebuild the prime site on King road- and your city refused citing "we've already spent enough" reverting back to their initial buy in back in 1991. I know, I was there. So, it is not all on the county as you put paint it. That city also originally had the intention of building out their own 800MHz trunking system, and had applied for the licenses- they were headed down that path as they are now. So they saved quite a bit of money being on the county system, and got more coverage and interoperability (if they wanted it) through programming of common talkgroups (i.e. Public Safety 1-7). The fact that they were not charged a fee until 4 years ago was all due to their buy in.

They also got a heck of a deal considering they have been some of the heaviest users of the system- from 1991-2010, figure the number of talkgroups, airtime used, maintenance, electricity, backhaul...most agencies in metro Atlanta spend that much PER YEAR just on maintenance alone for their radio systems.

If you are referring to the Morgan Falls repeater, that is licensed to the county and has been since 1990. Same for the Stonewall Tell repeater. I am not aware that any of the cities show any licenses for their own conventional repeaters, but I could be wrong.

The buildout of a separate system is a waste of money plain and simple. Classic duplication of services. The new county system is moving forward, staging is right around the corner. It's a shame that the taxpayers of these north county cities are going to end up paying twice for something they really don't need. But hey, they can afford it, right? We'll see how they feel when they get their tax bills. They might not be too happy if they found out those millions spent on a new radio system they are already paying the county for.

But what I do I care. I'm just Joe Taxpayer. I don't have a dog in the fight. Just a man with a calculator adding up the waste I see. SMH.
 
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