Ohio and Marshall County emergency communication upgrade

[djkmeissner]

Found this interesting article from Friday about Ohio and Marshall Counties joining forces to upgrade emergency communications. Are they planning on replacing SIRN or is this an upgrade to SIRN? I also wonder what happens if the internet goes down with this virtual system?

Ohio, Marshall Counties Partner on Emergency Communications Upgrade

WHEELING — Ohio and Marshall counties will jointly spend nearly $500,000 on a new system to keep emergency communication towers in operation. Ohio County Emergency Management Agency Director Lou Vargo updated Ohio County commissioners this week on a partnership between Ohio County and Marshall...

www.theintelligencer.net

 

[mtindor]

Found this interesting article from Friday about Ohio and Marshall Counties joining forces to upgrade emergency communications. Are they planning on replacing SIRN or is this an upgrade to SIRN? I also wonder what happens if the internet goes down with this virtual system?

Ohio, Marshall Counties Partner on Emergency Communications Upgrade

WHEELING — Ohio and Marshall counties will jointly spend nearly $500,000 on a new system to keep emergency communication towers in operation. Ohio County Emergency Management Agency Director Lou Vargo updated Ohio County commissioners this week on a partnership between Ohio County and Marshall...

www.theintelligencer.net

No they aren't replacing SIRN. I can't speak of actual fiber-based connectivity, but I'm sure they have multiple microwave paths between every site in the simulcast cell. And when they say Internet, they may not mean commodity internet and may just be referencing IP (over microwave or fiber). Remember, that is a simulcast cell. The cell consists of multiple physical sites. That cell is controlled by the prime site.

ASTRO 25 Virtualized Prime Site - Motorola Solutions

Simulcast operation on P25 systems enables wide-area radio coverage while efficiently reusing frequencies at adjacent sites.

www.motorolasolutions.com

Perhaps somebody who actually knows something significant about P25 trunking can eleborate more than I can.

 

[djkmeissner]

No they aren't replacing SIRN. I can't speak of actual fiber-based connectivity, but I'm sure they have multiple microwave paths between every site in the simulcast cell. And when they say Internet, they may not mean commodity internet and may just be referencing IP (over microwave or fiber). Remember, that is a simulcast cell. The cell consists of multiple physical sites. That cell is controlled by the prime site.

ASTRO 25 Virtualized Prime Site - Motorola Solutions

Simulcast operation on P25 systems enables wide-area radio coverage while efficiently reusing frequencies at adjacent sites.

www.motorolasolutions.com

Perhaps somebody who actually knows something significant about P25 trunking can eleborate more than I can.

Thank you for the information. Microwave or fiber makes sense. I know when I lived in New Hampshire the local fire department had fiber all over town for their fire alarm boxes so pretty neat that a city or county run their own fiber lines.

 

[kf8yk]

I don't think the EMA director has a clue how it works, it certainly has nothing to do with the Internet. This is just a lifecycle replacement for an older G series prime site, functionally nothing changes.

The virtual part is instead of having physically separate site controllers and voting comparators these functions are virtualized and run on just two (or four) physical servers. The servers hosting the virtualized applications are still physically at the prime site & use the same backhaul to the zone controller as the older G series equipment. A 20 channel G series prime site occupying 2 full racks gets shrunk to about 8 RU. It's very similar to an IT department consolidating a bunch of standalone servers to VM's or containers installed on an on-premise host.

Support for the standalone G series controllers & voters ends in 5 years so most of these older simulcast sites have plans to migrate.

 

[maus92]

Virtualized controllers will be required for future system software upgrades starting in 2026, and D-series base station radios in the early 2030s.