The Chief of Macedonia PD was ranting on a public Facebook about how glad he is they didn't do this 800 system, and each base radio will have to be updated to the tune of 250k each,so they would have had to pay 750k for three base radios,for new upgrades. This can't be remotely the truth,is it? I think his numbers are off. A lot of users are not going to afford that.He does allude to depts. jumping ship.Of course, he rants on an on about how great the current 420 system is,which,well, not so much.
Was this recent or are you talking about a few months ago? Are these costs you're talking about to move from 800 to the new P25 system? I would think if the new P25 system is going to get built out up north it would make sense to join that system from the start. I wanted them to stay on conventional but now that I've gotten knee deep into op25 recording I wish they were on the 800 system.
Or are you talking about his post from a few months ago when they almost lost wireless 911 PSAP termination at their dispatch and the city was (somewhat rightfully) angry? I saw that rant and I think it was more based on the re-occuring costs of using the system than any forecasted budget issues for the county upgrades if I remember correctly.
Macedonia is cash strapped and I believe it would be a challenge for Macedonia to afford the per-radio subscriber costs of using the 800 system. Today Macedonia Dispatch has a 800 radio (probably just a mobile XTL5000 or something?) for dispatching Northfield Village Fire. You can hear the Motorola "go ahead" chirp ending at the begining of their transmissions. I've assumed it wasn't a true dispatch console and just a car radio since I started hearing those.
When Northfield Village PD units go into the Hard Rock casino they take an 800 FD radio with them presumably because they can't get into the UHF system from inside that building. I'm not sure if there is a repeater of some sort in there or it just penetrates that building better than the 420 system? I've often wondered this since unless I'm mistaken the only logical tower up here is Chamberlain Rd.
The underlying issue really is cost as far as I can tell. I live here and we just defeated two income tax levies that would have taken us to a 2.25% income tax rate - one of them for 20 years to generate 20 million for a recreation center, the other for ten years to deal with side street road repair. Inevitably they're going to pass something to pay for roads, but I doubt they're going to fund new radios.
I find it hard to believe people will bail on the Summit 800 system if they've invested $$ into owning radios too. I could see if they won't put out more cash to roll onto the new P25 maybe, but I just assume transition to that was going to be semi-transparent reprogramming? I didn't consider the dispatch console costs needing to be born by each city.
His argument if I remember it correctly was that the cost of permanently owning their own conventional UHF radios and repeater was cost effective even with service calls and occasional replacement radios. It doesn't have an annual subscriber budget overhead and in their current system things "worked fine" which is very arguable now that the scope of their coverage has changed.
I can see the 423.625Mhz tower from my window as I write this. The problem is for some many months now you can hear units on the road struggle to get into the repeater. This is more predominant with the Sagamore PD units on a handheld way off in the distance. When the Macedonia tower was erected and the input antenna height engineered my guess is it wasn't expected to provide amazing handheld coverage in the lower terrain areas of Sagamore - but works at say 35w coming off a car radio. (remember, Sagamore ran off their own tower and repeater at Valley View near Dunham for years w/o issue).
I've actually wondered how long it would be before someone decided to put an input for 423.625 on that tower Sagamore tower and make 423.625 a multi-input system if they're going to stick with it. They seem to be content with "i'll call you" instead which makes me cringe. You can't call them in a foot chase.
What drives me absolutely nuts is when dispatch says "I didn't hear you" or "you're all noise" and either their consoles are broken or they're full of it because I hear it rock solid off their repeater. That means they received a copyable signal at their tower input (that they presumably hear in unison with the repeater) AND repeated it back out the 423.625 output but for some reason their console didn't hear it?? Even other cops have keyed up and said "He said XYZ" which has had me wondering if the increased fire traffic and two simultaneous dispatchers in that room is creating too much background noise? Speculation on my part
Then Macedonia took over FD for the three communities. There are areas of the valley that I'm surprised they can get into 423.625 from at all. (Like down by the Ski resort). When Northfield Center ran it's own FD on 423.75 their repeater was on the tower out at SR21 (I forget what radio station it is). That was how Summit County dispatch was able to talk to them from Akron - and presumably that whole package is still there, so why not make that another input into 423.95 for the FD off that tower, or move all fire to 423.75 since it'd probably cover just fine, if not better? I've waited to see how this played out or if they just ended up joining 800mhz.
Other than a new re-occurring billable expense they wouldn't really gain much going to 800 in my mind. Summit County deputies already have 420 radios in their car and regularly talk directly to Macedonia units. Twinsburg FD units already do the same on fire band. Its not like they're missing out on the MAC channels, and who knows how well it'd perform down in the valley if the nearest tower is still just on Chamberlin?
When Twinsburg FD moved to 800 your could tell they had a lot of decode issues. They'd sound like R2D2 a lot (and it wasn't my scanner, dispatch complained) and for awhile there I was hearing FD units drive around doing radio testing. I don't know what modifications were made but it seems to have improved quite a bit.
Something was clearly broken with whatever Macedonia dispatch was using for FD tones because they'd tone out, the tones would end, the carrier would hang for X more seconds, and the FD units would come back and ask if there was a call or not. (Nobody heard the dispatch). Whatever that is, its probably unrelated to the RX issues and more of an issue with the tone out system at the console. But it was frustrating because I have two-tone detect recording and SMS paging me and it'd run out of time and I'd get empty audio files.
