January 2008
New Chairman of the Board of Supervisors
George Hargrave of Galway during his speech upon accepting the
chairmanship named the new public safety radio as one of his priority
projects for 2008. He specifically mentioned the need to implement
parts of the system in 2008 and progress moving toward total completion.
Bids were received for the purchase of
three new radio towers in late December 2007. The lowest compliant bid
was received from Sabre Towers at approximately $209,800. The official
acceptance of the bids is scheduled for the February Public Safety
Committee meeting. These towers are for Providence, Milton (County
Communications Center) and Mt. McGregor.
Bids are on the street now for the
purchase of communications shelters. These are the pre-cast concrete
shelters that will house our radio equipment at the various radio
sites. Bids are due back in early February and if all goes well we
should be in a position to accept bids at the February Public Safety
Committee meeting.
In late 2007 we implemented our first
base station in the 800MHz. frequency band at Providence. This station
will see very limited duty as it was put on the air for FCC compliance
reasons. We have put a very limited number of mobiles on the air along
with the station for purposes of doing testing. Because Providence is
at the far western portion of the county we understand this station will
not have universal coverage throughout the county. Some channels have
been linked to the consoles at the communications center for the purpose
of doing testing between mobile units and dispatchers. This station is
on the air solely for the purpose of FCC compliance and testing.
A bid specification is being prepared for
the purpose purchasing new station house monitors for outdoor warning
devices. This is in its early stages but we aiming toward purchasing
monitors that will allow us to have more tone coded functions available,
such as a single set of tones for pre-planned day-time mutual aid thus
reducing the need to run through many sets of tones individually. More
to come on this.
We have received the last of our required
frequency concurrence letters from other FCC license holders to allow us
to move EMS operations off of 155.925 MHz. to 154.355 MHz. We can now
begin the process of purchasing the necessary base station equipment to
start making 155.925 a fulltime alerting channel. Please note this
does not mean you are required to start buying hi-band pagers yet.
There is much work left to do before we are ready to announce high band
paging is available. One very time consuming planning project we need
to complete is laying out a tone matrix between EMS and fire so that we
are sure no two agencies are sharing the same tone scheme.
We continue work on the new microwave
system. We have a project due date of June 30, 2008 to be off the
current system and on a new system. This is a result of T-Mobile
purchasing our current license at FCC auction. We have authorized a
contract with Alcatel-Lucent to accomplish FCC licensing and system
engineering.
The Office of
Emergency Services applied for a grant pertaining to enhancing our
proposed public safety radio system for better interoperability. We
applied for funding to assist in offsetting the cost of purchasing
mobiles and portables contained within the parameters of the proposed
new system. The amount we requested was approximately $1.150M dollars.
We will know in a few months if Saratoga County was selected to receive
the grant funding.
These are just a few of the highlights of
the progress we are making. We will make a concerted attempt to keep
you updated on the progress by using the web site.
As always any questions please feel free
to contact the Office of Emergency Services 885-2232.
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