Radio System

 Update March  2008

Office of Emergency Services Director P..Lent

We are making progress with the new radio system.  The Board of Supervisors has approved the purchase of three towers from Sabre Communications and those towers have been ordered.  We anticipate the delivery of the towers in May.  Those towers will be to replace the old tower at Providence, a new tower at the county communications facility in Milton and a new tower at the New York State Correctional Facility at McGregor.  The priority delivery is for the towers of Providence and Milton to be produced first.  The total cost of the tower contracts is $209,870.

Additionally, a contract was awarded to CSI Shelters of Londonderry, NH for our pre-cast concrete communications shelters.  We have ordered two versions of shelters a large shelter 12’X35’ and a smaller design of 12’X30’.  Most of the sites below the Adirondack Park blue line will be using the larger shelter.   We have worked out a delivery schedule with CSI so that shelters will be delivered on an as needed basis.  First shelters to be delivered will be for Providence, Milton and Halfmoon.  We anticipate those deliveries to occur in late May or early June.  The total cost of the contract with CSI is just over $920,000 plus shipping and setting the shelters on pads.

We have awarded a contract to Alcatel-Lucent for the microwave system for the new system.  We have already ordered four hops (or paths between sites) to replace our existing microwave system.  We were required to do this to vacate our band as it has been purchased by T-Mobile PCS and we need to be off the 2.1GHz. band by mid summer.  Alcatel will also provide all other paths of microwave technology for the new system.  We have designed and will be implementing a DS-3 digital microwave system.  That represents a significant increase in the capacity and speed over our current system.  The first four paths have been ordered are in production at this time.  The total value of the contract is approximately $2 million but T-Mobile will be reimbursing the county approximately $598,000 of the total cost.

Our consultants Blue Wing Services is working on and has just about completed a RFI (request for information) that will be issued to selected radio vendors to obtain their technical feed-back on our system design and operational features.  This will allow us to understand how the manufacturers will attempt to meet our operational requirements.  We anticipate this will allow vendors to tell us what equipment they will use to fulfill our needs (both backbone and field equipment).  I anticipate that representatives of the various emergency services will be invited to listen to presentations made by the vendors in response to our RFI.   We are looking to have this completed by late April or early May.  

The next largest contract and portion of the project to be undertaken will be the awarding of the contract for site preparation and tower erection.  We are working through the bid specifications details with our engineering consultants (Chazen Engineering).  We anticipate that bid will be on the streets in April. 

We issued a bid specification for the purchase of new station monitors.  Our basis for that purchase is buy monitors that provide us more reliable and newer monitors to replace our current monitors that are over 25 years old.  The new monitors will allow us to have more flexibility regarding tone assignments for siren activation.  The low bid was submitted by Capital Digitronics, who submitted a bid using Federal products as the station monitor.  The total cost of that bid was $39,000. 

Please be advised that Capital Digitronics will be requesting to visit stations to be sure there are no technical issues that need to be resolved prior to the installation of the new monitors.