Regina, Saskatchewan System Upgrade

[RBerezowski]

The Regina Police recently (July 2003) installed a new 12 channel ASTRO trunked system. It was a migration from their older Smartnet system installed in 1990. From what I can tell, it was a major upgrade, with a new controller.

Yesterday morning, the main system was taken down and all users were moved to their analog backup system. They are now doing "upgrades" to the main ASTRO system. The main system was down all day and all night. As of this morning, the main system was still down. The technicians were working late into the evening yesterday, so they've been working at least 12 hours on the upgrade itself. This seems to be a major project. I don't know how long it will take.

Anyone care to speculate what kind of upgrade could be happening? The system is young, only in service for a little over a year. I doubt they're doing any major architecture changes, not so soon after being installed.

Rob

 

[FPO703]

They may be upgrading the ASTRO version. They might also be converting it over to all digital.

What kind of radios are they using now?

 

[RBerezowski]

They bought new XTS5000 radios for all of the police users. They are the only ones using digital. Fire and EMS got new radios as well, but I'm not sure of the model. Despite getting new radios, they are operating in analog mode.

All of the other city departments are also on the trunked system. A lot of older analog radios are still using the system. Most of the city departments didn't have budget for new radios, so some of them got analog "hand-me downs" to use on the new system.

I don't know what kind of base station repeaters are being used, but right now 5 of the 12 repeaters are capable of carrying digital traffic. Perhaps they are upgrading the other 7 repeaters to be capable of digital traffic. However, capacity has not been an issue on this system. Very seldom do I see system busies.

Rob

 

[RBerezowski]

Just to update everyone, they switched back to the main system early Wednesday morning. After some testing, the police users were moved back to the digital talkgroups later that day. All in all, the "upgrade" probably required about 15 hours or so of work, and about 24 hours of downtime.

I have not yet noticed any difference in system operation, so I don't have any clues on what kind of upgrade was done. Perhaps I'll see or hear something later.

Rob