York County P25 System
I am sorry to hear that there are still problems in the west zone. The system works very well every place else. The headline of the news story is a bit of a grandstand with its "irks PA firefighters". The problem sounds bigger than it is.
It is unlikely, totally unlikely, that they would go shopping at this point. The system is up and running. Driving through the country side there are locations when, like any thing digital, it starts dropping out. Unlike an analog system that suffers low audio/high noise levels, digital systems suffer that dreaded robot sound and only partial words come out. These places are relatively few but when lives are at stake, well, its a problem.
The Hanover area was a problem and as the article states, 2 additional tower locations are being built out. I do not know if they are complete at this time. I had not heard about the patch situation in which total loss occured during a fire. They patch 2 things together all the time. Maybe they can get 3 working as well. York County simply has the newest system of all it surrounding counties.
I am on my borough's EMA staff and also do ARES/RACES HAM work with county EMA. I have been fortunate enough to get a first hand look at the technology at the 911 center and at one of the main tower sites where repeater sites come in and the microwave link goes to county. It is amazing stuff. It was my first time to actually see the "waveguide" hollow copper pipe conductor used for the microwave signal. The radio shacks are quite impressive. The description in the link that someone posted was very good. But there are also some Fire Police channels and now some new Muni channels appeared with the last program updates.
I scan Fire Dispatch and Fire Ops as well as EMA when I am on the road. I only get my local PD channel as I am EMA. Thanks to Radio Reference I can simply pull up the stream when I am at home, thanks RR.
Regards,
Stan
