FARMINGTON — Stan Wheeler, director of Franklin County’s communication center, told commissioners Tuesday that the county does not have a solid and stable backbone for its communications system.
It needs to be remedied, he said.
Wheeler gave commissioners the highlights of a preliminary study on the state of emergency dispatching services and where the county needs to be.
The county contracted with Communication Consulting Service Inc. of Gray in October for a countywide comprehensive study to determine how to improve communications.
Rick Davol, president of the service, was tasked with reviewing the county radio system, developing solutions to problems as outlined and to prioritize solutions into three categories: immediate, one- to five-year, and long-term goals.
Among the issues Davol identified were long lead times on equipment repair, repeated failure of the same equipment, portable radio coverage, not being able to hear units in the field and frequency bleed-over that makes a howling sound, Wheeler said.
Fire service issues included missed pager calls, getting paged and hearing a distorted voice, poor mobile radio coverage and extremely poor portable radio coverage, he said.
Law enforcement officials also identified mobile radio and portable radio communications among their problems. There were also concerns about not being heard by dispatchers and poor repeater performance.
Issues found at the communications center included 12 radios without filters, a radio console more than 10 years old and use of mobile radios as control stations.
Another issue was the communications tower installed in 2013 at the new center being potentially overloaded, he said. It has 11 antennas on it and Davol has recommended a stress analysis be done.
At the Mosher Hill tower in Farmington, concerns were the county fire is licensed for 325 watts effective radiated power but currently only 211 watts are being transferred, which means it is not working to capacity, Wheeler said.
Additional potential sources of failure were the equipment police and firefighters use that included poor mobile radio installations, bad vehicle antennas, old portable batteries, broken rubber antennas and radios out of alignment.
Probably the largest single issue identified as the cause of poor service is the county’s terrain, he said.
One of the immediate actions the study recommends is installing a fire south and law enforcement repeater on Jay’s tower and to move to radio over Internet protocol, he said. This would involve talks with the town of Jay and the Jay Police Department, he said. The cost for improvements is estimated at $55,000, with additional Internet provider costs.
By making that improvement, it is believed it would help improve radio transmissions for emergency responders in the southern part of the county, including Jay and Wilton, he said.
Installations of repeaters in Weld and on Saddleback, both with an Internet provider networks, rebuilding the Mosher Hill Tower or relocating equipment to another tower, were among improvements recommended.
He did not have an overall estimate of cost for improvements but Wheeler advised it would not be cheap.
Wheeler was told to put money in the 2015-16 budget for improvements and to continue working with emergency responders to devise a plan to make improvements to bring back to the commission.
There may be funding that can be tapped before July 1 to make improvements, Wheeler said, but first he needs to have a discussion with Davol.
Tim Hardy, director of the county Emergency Management Agency, said to help address immediate needs to fill in communications gaps, responders have been told how to switch to the Emergency Management Agency systems on Mt. Blue and Mosher Hill towers.
dperry@sunmediagroup.net
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