Bugs push county radios back to analog
JANESVILLE — Most Rock County emergency and law enforcement agencies have taken a technological step backward while experts try to work out the bugs in the county's new digital radio communications system.
All the police departments in the county except Beloit this week went back to using analog radios to communicate with 911 dispatchers at the Rock County Communications Center. The change was a response to problems the agencies had with cut-off communications on new digital radios.
General Communications, the vendor that installed the county's digital system, is searching for the cause of the dropped communications, said Kathy Sukus, interim director of the Rock County Communications Center. Among other things, they are checking the software installed in portable radios, she said.
No timeline has been set to finish troubleshooting, Sukus said.
Things seemed to go well in late June when the county made the switch to digital. Then police departments including Janesville and Edgerton reported having some dropped calls, she said. On Sunday when the county's server that supports the digital system froze up, officials decided to call a countywide meeting and talk about how things were working, Sukus said.
When Janesville police on Tuesday requested to switch back to analog, other departments started speaking up about problems, Sukus said. As a group, the county's smaller police departments along with the Rock County Sheriff's Office decided to switch back, as well.
Fire and emergency medical departments will continue to use the digital radios on their main channel, but they are using analog radios on secondary channels, Sukus said. The county went digital in late June as a way to prepare for a federal mandate requiring most radio communications convert to narrow band by the first of the year. The six-month window was intended to give the county wiggle-room in case of problems.
"We knew this is a complex system and there could be problems," Sukus said.
It is possible the county could keep using analog radios, but that could shorten communication ranges for most departments once the switch is made to narrow band, she said.
Jul 28, 2012 at 12:21 a.m.
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More transmit sites are probably part of the problem as digital radios don't deal well with interference. Departments have coplained of hearing strange noises during transmission and lost calls.
Jul 27, 2012 at 12:51 p.m.
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Jvlhomeowner, your observations are spot on and consistent with the differences in design requirements between digital modulated narrowband and analog modulated narrowband systems.
Although digital modulated narrowband will provide "perfect" audio to the edge of coverage as opposed to analog modulated narrowband's audio quality gradually getting worse and worse as you approach the edge of coverage, digital modulated narrowband will drop out (dead spots) in non-edge areas that were "fuzzy" in analog modulated narrowband areas. For this reason, digital modulated narrowband systems often requires more equipment (receive and transmit sites) than analog modulated narrowband to eliminate those dead spots.
Unfortunately, there isn't much unique with the situation being encountered here in the transition to digital narrowband. Communities often go with low bidders and end up with an inadequate amount of hardware to provide the area of coverage needed, having to later add equipment to fill in the dead spots. Seems to me this isn't an issue of software in the remote radios, but an indication of problems with system design/tuning. This will more than likely end up requiring additional receive sites (if dropped calls are talk-in) and additional transmit sites (if dropped calls are talk-out) to eliminate the dead spots before returning to digital narrowband.
Jul 27, 2012 at 11:25 a.m.
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Only cost the county 2 million dollars to figure out they were no good. And of course fire and ambulance will use them. Can't have all that good equipment go to waste.
Jul 26, 2012 at 7:32 p.m.
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In my experience as a scanner listener ( out side antennas, and several radios) and retired dispatcher - audio on the systems that narrow banded became a bit lower in volume, but were quite understandable.( I just turned up the volume knob) I still hear systems from the south suburbs of Chicago easily here in Janesville. Narrowband Analog systems have not reported many problems since changing over....Departments that went digital, however have almost all had problems.
Jul 26, 2012 at 6:07 p.m.
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the cheapest bidder isnt always the best
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