Does anyone have detail infomation on the FD frequencies for the Salem and Gardner Lake Depts. I think they still dispatched on 33.90, but I recently heard they are also on UHF?
Salemn/Gardner Lake are dispatched by KX on 33.80 and I believe they are going to go to if they have not already alpha paging. The broadcast is then retransimitted on their operations frequency of 33.90. The 453.6125 Cross band is actually in Glastonbury on Birch Mountain. It is located on the town of Glastonbury's tower on land lease from teh Town of Manchester water company. This site was put in by KX for Hebron and my guess is would not really be a good site for the Salem area. The second site I am not as familiar with. It has been up for a couple of years on a cell tower. I believe they can change between 33.90 and 33.74 with 33.90 being the primary. This would be your best site in the Salemn area.
Just as a correction the problem with the alpha paging has nothing to do with the new Zetron Console. It is the CAD program that they went with. They saved a ton of money going to this vendor and so far from what I hear they are very happy with the program. They are working on a fix for the CAD software and they are confident they will be able to get it working it will just take some time.
I know that BOZRAH/GARDNER LAKE are utilizing UHF, as I heard KX dispatching a service announcement late last week. The only problem is when I went to look at my scanner, it already resumed scanning.
I think the FREQ was one of the listings Portable14 listed, as I had programmed them with a bunch of UHF w/o PLtones.
What is the purpose of the low band to UHF repeaters? Are they set up to allow UHF portables at a incident to talk long range to other low band radios that might be approaching the scene (or at the scene)? Or are the crossband repeaters primarily used by command portables to talk from a scene back to the dispatch center? Do they ever use a onscene repeater (MO3) in conjunction with a hill top crossband repeater? Peter Sz
The cross band repeater has many good features and some not so good.
Here is the history.
Departments who were tired of the long antenna from thier low band portable sticking them in the eye wanted to find something less intrusive. Now why Eastern CT went to UHF and skipped right over VHF I have no idea it happened long before I got involved. Anyway it started with in vehicle repeaters like the motorola PAC and PAC-RT which enabled a department to use UHF portables to transmit throught a 100 watt low band mobile radio. Our department had a GE Mobile Extender connected to a RCA Silver Head as its first in vehicle repeater. Over time it became clear that is was easier to have a fixed site that was always on rather than waiting for a vehicle with a repeater to show up on scene. Thus the creation of the fixed site cross band repeater. Over time as more repeaters became active in more towns you created this huge low band back bone that multi cast on several UHF frequencies. You could be in one end of the county and hear the interior attack of a town on the opposite end of the county whereas before you would have never heard them becuase their low band portable could not transmit that far. Great if you are a whacker like me and want to listen to everything but bad if you are an incident commander who cannot communication because of so much radio traffic.
TN I beleive has the most cross band repeaters. KX and QV have a few as well. Not too sure about WW. I know the Windhams operate exclusively on 33.64 and I am not aware of any fixed site cross band on 33.64. Willimantic fire operates on UHF as well as the Sirens frequency. Lebanon is gone to KX now but they operated on 33.90. There may be a cross band in Lebanon but my memory fails me. Not sure if there is a cross band down on Plains Hill for Franklin.
The other way we use cross band repeaters in TN land is from the dispatch center out. Sometimes in a certain area their is poor coverage on low band from the primary site at Bald Hill in Tolland. The dispatch center has UHF link radios or control station that TX on UHF to the cross band repeater in the location that is having trouble. This allows them to extend their coverage away from their primary site.
The main reason why TN continues to do this and will do it for the forseeable futuer is becuase of the state of the UHF public safety spectrum in and around CT. Obviously if we had useable RF in the PS UHF band we could make a concerted effort to move to an all UHF system.
dittrimd - thanks for the history. If someone got ambitious and plotted out a map of all the fixed site UHF fire repeaters in eastern Connecticut, that would be interesting. I don't know if Google maps is any good for doing something like that. The map wouldn't have to be super accurate - just showing the right UHF freqs in the right towns would be a good start. Peter Sz
Err...sorry I did not get that. Not sure if you don't like cross bands or VHF...
Anyway...
If my post was a little unclear I apologize but what I was getting at with the comment about going from low band right to UHF and skipping over VHF was that it just seems logical to move up to the next band when you are transitioning.
Low band travels really well with enough power and a long antenna. VHF travels well with a smaller antenna but not as great as low band. UHF travels but not as well as VHF and so on.
Anyway since a dipatch center like TN who for its entire existince operated off of only one tower site until the move to UHF. Then you see the emergence in-vehicle cross band repeaters then fixed site cross band repeaters. It is so out of hand that in TN's coverage area every town except for Ellington, Union and Andover has a cross band repeater somewhere. East Windsor has a UHF repeater for thier trunking system since they are now all UHF. TN now either has radios or controls radios at over 16 sites in and around Tolland County!!!
Isn't it amazing how much this topic changed since the start of it all. It started with "Salem/Gardner Lake FD" and now it's talking about TN......People just love to HiJack the topics here.