St. Clair Co TRS STARCOM21 site down

[nick1427d]

St. Clair Co STARCOM site has experienced a "castastophic failure". All radios are operating in site trunking but are not functioning at all according to users. Fire paging is also down of course because they went with TG paging, and they're are also experiencing VHF paging backup issues on the fire side.

This would be a great opportunity for anyone near St. Clair Co to monitor old legacy frequencies and see if any of them will be used. To my knowledge the PSAPs have limited capability to monitor those legacy systems so who knows.

This should be a good reminder, that in my opinion, you never abandon capability for simple conventional alerting and simple conventional simplex communications to dispatch.

Madison Co and Monroe county sites appear to be functioning.

 

[Starcom21]

I was wondering what was going on. I'm in South County St Louis and was trying to dsdplus that site and couldn't get it to come up at all

 

[Starcom21]

Failed, Isolated

St. Clair Co STARCOM site has experienced a "castastophic failure". All radios are operating in site trunking but are not functioning at all according to users. Fire paging is also down of course because they went with TG paging, and they're are also experiencing VHF paging backup issues on the fire side.

This would be a great opportunity for anyone near St. Clair Co to monitor old legacy frequencies and see if any of them will be used. To my knowledge the PSAPs have limited capability to monitor those legacy systems so who knows.

This should be a good reminder, that in my opinion, you never abandon capability for simple conventional alerting and simple conventional simplex communications to dispatch.

Madison Co and Monroe county sites appear to be functioning.

 

[Starcom21]

"MOTOROLA - your system is 20 years old needs to be replaced with a new Phase 2 simulcast system. You also have to replace all your radios. Please hand over the money"

 

[Starcom21]

Tg 7096 is the only one I see on 851.225

 

[Starcom21]

 

[Starcom21]

The Madison County site appears to be running affiliation requests and talk groups on its site for st. Clair County. Unfortunately the Madison County site only has six frequencies and it's often maxed out during busy times.

 

[Starcom21]

St. Clair County site is now back up

 

[nick1427d]

Apparently lightning strike caused the issue. At least were back up but those few hours were not fun. Like I said maybe it will cause some of us to look at some alternatives for when this happens again.

 

[kruser]

Apparently lightning strike caused the issue. At least were back up but those few hours were not fun. Like I said maybe it will cause some of us to look at some alternatives for when this happens again.

As many physical towers site 3-59 has, you would think they would have a backup site controller (or 3) located at one or more of the other towers for that site and more than one redundant link linking all the towers together via microwave, fiber etc.
A single point of failure that brings the entire site down is not good. Especially for that site when you look at how much area the site covers.
At least then the site could still operate in site trunking mode even if it can't talk to the master Starcom controller for one reason or another.

 

[Starcom21]

I would assume they have the I call and itacs (800mhz interop).

But, overall, I think they need to license some 700/800 megahertz repeaters all over the county that can be used for backup when needed. Keep traffic to a minimum during this kind of situation.

I wonder if their radios are capable of DMR? They could use the wireless USA system as backup too, possibly

Apparently lightning strike caused the issue. At least were back up but those few hours were not fun. Like I said maybe it will cause some of us to look at some alternatives for when this happens again.

 

[nick1427d]

Terry, we do have several 700/800 channels we can access such as 8Call90 7Fire83 etc. problem is no one knows about them, no one gets trained on them, and dispatch does not use them so we’re not even sure anyone would answer us.

I suggested years ago to make the NIFOG 7TACs more accessible to users and properly train them and it fell on deaf ears. Heck put them in the dispatch console and just mute them until needed.

Im still curious why if the site completely failed then why didn’t our radios go into failsoft. Maybe someone more knowledgeable on that can help me out. I need to make sure it’s not a programming issue on our end. However from talking to other users today everyone was dead in the water and lost all ability to use their radio except on off network direct radios like the SOA channels. I know most of the Fire side has been migrating to APX portables so imagine they fell back to VHF channels.

I didn’t get a chance to do much monitoring as I was trying to get the guys to use other means of communicating. I’d imagine there were a lot of telephone calls lol.