robbinsj2 said:
Why Somerset's system? I would think they have as good coverage of Piscataway as anybody else, and they certainly have more excess capacity (currently) than any other system around.
This is a trend happening around the country with respect to trunking systems. Here near St. Louis, a newer countywide system across the river in Illinois is capable of backing up the City of St. Louis if anything happened to their system (if St. Louis upgraded their equipment - the new system is a digital only and St. Louis still has most of its equipment analog only, but has a deployable cache). Likewise, several municipalities here have their system key and a few talkgroups programmed into their neighbors' radios just in case something happens.
For us out here, this is a step towards a larger connected zoned system which lets users travel around the coverage areas of different systems and track interoperability talkgroups through the roaming system based on the sites the car or portable registers into. Missouri set aside $2M for a P25 master site controller to link trunked systems in the area together in that manner. Unfortunately, trunking out here hasn't caught on and there are still departments hoarding 28 discrete VHF channels, most which are rarely used.
If Piscataway and Somerset County someday tied their site controllers together, there would be seamless coverage throughout both areas.
And, maybe not. It might be as simple as system failure and a phone call to borrow a set of radios, although they could probably program the system and a spare TG or two into what they had, if they were given permission.
This was a couple of days ago. Has anyone got the skinny on that?