OFFICIAL MSWIN Thread

[INDY72]

There will be a Pt Gibson tower... it was just NOT in his first P2 map... the latest map has it plotted... but we wont have exact location until they get further along in the construction process..... Both the Hazelhurst, and the Simpson County Harrisville site are built.

I remember a Crystal Springs site on the contractors maps.... Maybe thats an lease site since there is an existing HUGE tower there on the West side of I-55.... Not sure if thats the new CSPD/CSVFD one, or an DPS... But its a tall sucker. The Lorman will cover to around Pt G.. the Utica will cover nearly there as well... Once they add the Pt G one youve got great coverage all around.... From the contractorsmaps the Pt G tower will be near the Entergy, MDPS, Cellular South, AT&T, and the Verizon sites.... And is right across the River not to far from an LWIN site.... Am willing to bet that some of these end up being the "Doloroso" type especially the Pt G one.

 

[INDY72]

Now once you get up in the Delta.. youll have 50 to 50 plus miles in coverage out accross that big flat open area... thats great ground for ANY band!

 

[SCPD]

Thanks for the update. Earlier concerns were expressed about the ability of the system to handle the anticipated volume in the Lamar Co. area. Well since I have the luxury of easily monitoring the 700 traffic on the LWIN Ferriday, LA tower, maybe I can put those concerns to rest if the MSWIN will be anything similar to LWIN. There are five freqs. in addition to the cc, on Ferriday tower, there must be a half a dozen are more SO's probably 20 to 30 local PD's and Fire and rescues, LWF etc...Very busy system, no strain whatsoever more folks signing on daily. These systems are very capable of handling a large number of entities with just a handful of freqs. trust me on that one...

 

[ffemt601]

You sure you got your names a freqs. matched up right? Collins and even Seminary would seem a pretty far stretch for even a GRE much less a "T" Uniden from that location. (yes they are quite deaf when compared to GRE.)

From there you SHOULD get Lamar (10 miles) and Rock Hill (11 m. Brooklyn?) easily, New Augusta (20 m.) maybe, and Oak Grove and Ellisville possibly. (22 m. each.) Seminary is 26 miles and Collins 32 miles. Pretty far even for a GRE's hot front end.

Yes, I just reprogrammed my 996T using freescan and loaded each location directly from RR in one at a time and verified the same findings. I am using the RS 800mhz antenna and like I said my findings are inverse of what I suspected. I do get some odd reflections from the west due to a shopping center and it occurs on 2m and 440 so I suspect the same issue is effecting 700mhz. I will take my 396T over to 589 and 98 and see how that fairs.

I guess I should begin looking to GRE in the future, but I am not a fan of their RS partnership and thus stuck with Uniden.

 

[ffemt601]

Thanks for the update. Earlier concerns were expressed about the ability of the system to handle the anticipated volume in the Lamar Co. area. Well since I have the luxury of easily monitoring the 700 traffic on the LWIN Ferriday, LA tower, maybe I can put those concerns to rest if the MSWIN will be anything similar to LWIN. There are five freqs. in addition to the cc, on Ferriday tower, there must be a half a dozen are more SO's probably 20 to 30 local PD's and Fire and rescues, LWF etc...Very busy system, no strain whatsoever more folks signing on daily. These systems are very capable of handling a large number of entities with just a handful of freqs. trust me on that one...

Thanks Hugh,

I am not too worried as Lamar is going to keep their 800 and just merely use the 700 for interop and the same thing goes for Forrest County as well. I assume that they built it to be able to easily expand as needs grow but it is one of the biggest concerns being raised.

 

[INDY72]

OK correction Its the CS and Hville sites done.. the Hazelhurst not sure about....

 

[INDY72]

MWIN growth potential..

Yes the Motorola ASTRO-25 platform is easily able to add to for growth... Its quite an robust platform... And the potential to add ANY other P-25 to it makes it quite frankly,... Amazing

 

[KE5TLF]

Ok I just went and looked at the RFP for phases 2 and 3 again and apparently the black stars are what that RFP is for. IOW the black stars are what ToM will be building from scratch and leasing(or selling) to the state since they were awarded the contract. Same as the majority of the sites in Phase 1.

The green stars now I'm guessing will be co-locations or built under another contract/contractor or some combination of both ???

Using Claiborne county as an example, since it's been mentioned already, in the listing of counties and the number of sites to be built in them shows 0 for Claiborne.

Another example, Warren county 2 green stars, 0 sites in the RFP. Same for several others with only green stars.

All the black stars are listed in the RFP as far is can tell. (I didn't verify every single one hehe)

 

[KE5TLF]

Motorola’s solution includes 135 trunked radio repeater tower sites selected
from over 700 surveyed candidate sites and meets the state’s 97% area
coverage reliability requirements. An additional 12 towers are proposed to
support dispatch centers. Each tower site will be equipped with an equipment
shelter, emergency power system, network equipment and redundant site
controllers. The total 147 sites consist of the following:
• 28 existing state/local towers
• 60 leased towers
• 59 new towers

Somebody do the math on that? LOL

 

[KE5TLF]

11. 150% future growth of subscribers.

13. Support a minimum of 64,000 unique subscriber ID’s and 16,000
talkgroups.

 

[INDY72]

Thats 147... BUT thats all prior to the emergency extra sites.... And before individual County/City builds of simulcast sites that can and will occur.... LOL For a prime example see the IN SAFE-T Lamar County is looking at possibly building another site with thier own funds/grants.... And I can imagine a couple of other counties that will also do this.

 

[KE5TLF]

There aren't any "emergency extra sites". There was an emergency purchase authourization to keep ToM/Motorola/Whoever working on up to 7 high priority sites while the 2nd RFP process ran it's course.

There was one "extra" site funded by this purchase autourization. (the new D8 dispatch center)

They only just awarded the do-over of the RFP to ToM on 8/24. The first time around it was awarded on 3/24 and subsequently rescinded on 6/3 due to some other contractor(s) whining. At the rate they are turning the things out I imagine ToM had quite a good start on some of those sites even in that relatively short amount of time. Obviously they'd expect to get paid for what they'd allready done regardless of the outcome of the contestation.

 

[INDY72]

lol... thats the only one so far... lol.. I expect more surprises down the road... LOL this is MS after all weg.

 

[SCPD]

Analysis of MSWIN in Southwest Miss.

I was recently critical of what I perceive to be "overkill" on the part of the MSWIN tower scheme. Well, today I decided to put the system to an unscientific but a fairly objective test devised by me. Using my Dell netbook, the Pro96Com software and my Pro-197 mobile, this is what I came up with:
*The system is solid along all points of US84 from Natchez to east of Brookhaven. At any point along the US 84 portion of my test, the software would hit on an average of three different control channels and never less than two. However, I was surprised to learn that practically in the backyard of the Dist. 9 substation there are some serious coverage lapses on Highway 51 south in the Bogue Chitto to Norfield area. When I say serious, I mean practically no coverage. Surely, Motorola is aware of this and will propose another tower to fill that void. The rest of the test consisted of travelling Highway 24 east of McComb to Woodville. The software mostly averaged two control channels in this area. However, I again noticed some pretty serious voids between Liberty and Centerville, despite having a pretty decent sized tower at Gloster. From Woodville to Natchez along US 61 coverage is solid, despite the Pinckneyville site still being off-line.
Also, from previous knowledge, I can attest that coverage along Hwy 98 west from McComb to Bude is solid.

So, my conclusions are this: The system is probably about as well designed as can be expected given the terrain in this part of the state. The hills, hollows, ridges and pines over here very well may chew this system up and spit it out. The system may need two additional towers over in SW to fill some serious voids. Only time will tell, but there is no doubt the MHP units will have to have vehicular repeaters for their HTs. I was actually stunned at my findings, because I was sure that the system would have nearly 100 percent coverage based on the towering network.

Incidentally, squelch on my 197 was set at 0 degrees and I was using a professionally cut pigtail antenna.

 

[KE5TLF]

The registration for the 18th WCC tower (so far), site 20111 (Vicksburg), showed up in the ASR database today with a status of granted. ASR # 1270556.

Note this a green star site on the BGA map somewhat confirming my speculation that the green stars are to be MWCC owned.

 

[INDY72]

Even with a HOT front end on GRE ans RS scaners they are still no match for the actual Motorola XTS 2500 or XTS 5000 And by no means are they near as good as the mobile brothers ... The system will also get additional tweaking on output power till they get optimal coverage from each site. I doubt seriously that each site is at its full peak of output power until all the sites are up, and testing has been finished....They have by no means run a serious field test on all the towers yet as all the towers are not up. I would expect tweaking to start as soon as those last three towers are up and wide area trunking. Expect changes in output and other things for at least the next thre months following completion.. real completion of p1.... then it starts all over again with p2.. lol... I know the only areas that have undergone serious range testing etc are the gulf coast areas. P1a, P2b also has about gone through its initial full tests.... P1c.. district 9 MHP area... aka SW MS isnt fully built lol so they cant do full testing yet.

 

[INDY72]

Then another round of testing once p2 is completed for functionality of the whole net ,.. and again when its fully done... then different testing after the second part is installed for outside connectivity/data for subscription linkage... So there may be issues here and there until EVERY part of this beast is finished.... full completion of ALL aspects is still three to four years out. Remember they have not even thought about announcing bids for the next part and are not until p3 is at least at the b section.

 

[INDY72]

Oh and yes the green stars are MWCC sites.. and a lot of them will be the "Doloroso" type.... The green dots/boxes with no construction are already ready sites that dont need prep work... AKA MS DPS, DOC, MF&A or other sites with existing structures. This includes the ETV sites..... Those already have MONSTER towers... Any existing tower of at least 300 feet or more of hieght is to be considered a good target lol....So if you guys can play with listings at those locations for existing ant towers.... You may find matches...

 

[KE5TLF]

no construction means no constuction had occurred at the time that map was generated.

EVERY P1 site on that map is a new construction site. That's a proven fact. I can't imagine green dots having a different meaning in P2.

After studying that BGA map as much as I have now I could imagine that revision of it was created to show the progress of the push to get the Gulf Coast - Jackson connection made. A pretty fair bet that earlier revisions (if there even were any) of the map had just the color coded stars for all sites and the legend and symbols for other site statuses were altered as construction progressed.

We need a more up to date version if one exists. Anyone got the cahones to call up BGA and ask for one?

Contact info
BGA Contact Us

 

[nexus]

Picked up a new talkgroup ID today on the Fountainbleu site. ID 13399 a couple of guys trying to do radio checks. One of them said he was at I-10 and I-110 which would put him right there in D'Iberville. Another one was inside his house trying to get out but was having problems. There was a callsign of LD-818 used. Does anyone know who "LD" is? These weren't radio techs, these were users just trying their portables out.

I got a snippet of the audio which you can listen to here:
http://www.nexusradio.us/audio/mswin-id13399.mp3

This was today around 5:20 PM. You can hear the one guy call the one inside the house LD-818 and then asked him if this was Robert. So if we can find out who uses the callsign LD-### then we can identify this talkgroup.