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| Radio System Update (chronological = most recent @ end)Updates as received from the Saratoga County Office of Emergency Services January 2008New 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. 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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