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Narrow Banding....HELP!
As most of you should know the FCC is mandating narrow banding by 2013. WE, our MABAS division and the entire county, just got the 10 questions prior to the award. 23 departments and 1 dispatch center to the tune of $665,000, this includes everything to complete the narrow banding, new stuff, reprogramming and paperwork. My question is; does anybody have any experience with this? Without everyone throwing the switch at once, this looks to be a nightmare. We border 2 counties and use 2 dispatch centers, with the other county just starting to think about it. We look to be the first in the state, and a guinea pig in this process, so come on, Mike, Chris, Ben, Ted, Paul, TJ, Art and all the rest….I need a communication plan.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John on
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NO help here, Our county Sheriff was trying to get a central dispatch center and did get some departments to sign on but I am not that familliar with the whole situation Sorry.
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Permalink Reply by Trainer on
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Yes Ted the system is in place, and I am by a long shot no expert. We have a trunked system by Motorola, but that’s a different system used for statewide deployment. Digital is out of the question now, technology is not their yet. We have to replace some radios, pagers, mobiles and bases, in order to have duel banks and wide/narrow band compatible. The big problem; and I found out we may be the only ones in the Midwest to start this, so we are to be the model for the rest, we have to come up with a communications plan for implementation.
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Interesting Tom, our reports is the range not as good. It’s easy to see the clearer part, less overlap of signal. Your link did not work however I went to the BK site and looked, doubtful we get away from the big M, we have a good sales rep plus the company is located in Illinois. For the most part, radios and pagers from M when they screw up and its not an easy fix, are sent in then usually come back with the same serial # but their completely new, and yes I know they go to Mexico. Like I said equipment is not the issues, it’s when we change over and our MA is not.
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We have several challenges to face, equipment is the easy one. Although after reading through mountains of paperwork yesterday, I’m not sure; 25-12.5 is the change, the FCC may mandate another change down the road to 6.5, I wonder if anything is compatible to that?
We have to replace 540 pagers, 125 portables, 70 mobiles and 3 bases. License renewal….I got completely lost on that subject, but $15 to the right guy and that will take care of that.
Then there’s the reprogramming, I’m going to have to learn to switch banks, under pressure plus no one is sure how the radio will react having wide and narrow with the same numbers, scanning may be out of the question.
Then sometime after 2013 when everyone has done it, another round of reprogramming to eliminate the old wide band, hopefully we can prepay for that.
Now the one exciting part is the chance to rewrite radio protocol for the entire state, make everything standard, INTEROPPERABILITY, we will be writing the model for everyone else to follow, how fun does that sound.
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Permalink Reply by Joe Stoltz on
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We're going through a similar process here. Right now it looks like we are going to 700 MHz and some brand-new channels exclusively for Public Safety.
The Sheriff and highway departments are the ones who really have to move. Some EMS is also on VHF high band and will have to move as well. The bulk of fire and EMS is on VHF low band which is NOT subject to re-banding.
We have an interesting situation here - there are a lot of fire folks who are convinced (unfairly) that low band is antiquated, and want to go to UHF. This involves spending money to replace mobiles, portables etc. but they don't want to spend a little MORE money to go to 700. Meanwhile they still grouse about the low band system.
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The survey was done before the grant, the equipment I listed is what needs replaced; for our dept it’s all pagers, mentor V is the only one capable. Anything made since 2002 should be ok, but not always, sometimes the only way to tell exactly is to plug in the laptop. $25 to reprogram?? How about if you were to do 600 or so, price go down? Now you’ve reprogrammed this year, 4 years from now when everyone else has done it, FCC says we have to take the old wide band out, another 600 to do.
You’re not grasping the problem, most of our MA will not convert for some time, we will be on a different band, in a different bank, unable to scan. Ya know I just got to thinking, what if we put the new programming on the second bank, and stay off of it till we can all change over, it surly can’t be that simple can it?
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Permalink Reply by Engineco913 on
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You could also consider installing the new complaint radio's to your new frequencies and also keeping your old radio's to use in a unified command incident.
Have you considered purchasing the programming kit that you can program all your own radios and pagers? This will surely be much cheaper than you originally think. The program and the cables to make the conversions should run you under a couple hundred bucks. If the other departments don't comply than it's unfortunately their issue. At least have the ability to communicate with them. (either by keeping the old radio;s installed or having a couple of portables.)
My area is switching from low band to entirely High band. My department and a few others are keeping the VHF radio's due to their better transmitting and receiving than the highband. With the positioning of the repeaters we will have plenty of access.
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AHHH another guinea pig, you make this sound way to easy. Good luck! I think we are going to need it
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Here in lies one of the problems; we have 6 operational channels, 3 are wide and 3 are narrow. In a U/C incident all 6 are used and keeping at least some of the old stuff is under consideration but is not likely as the new will go both ways.
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Permalink Reply by Don Vuletic on
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We went to narrow band last year and still are working out the bugs. Our station covers many deep vallies and we have problems where the system has not worked. We just went with longer antennas on the trucks and its seems to have corrected that problem but we have to go to talk around to communicate with each other on portables. The company is trying to help with the problem and I hope we can solve it soon.
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Very helpful Ted; the one problem our tec is working on, and I’ll just use this as an example, can we scan 154.190 on wide and 154.190 on narrow on the same scan? Does that make any sense? He didn’t know how the radio would react. That’s the frequency we are paged on, we are pretty sure the pagers can be set up to handle this, but those of us with radios were not sure. We will need to be dispatched from both as we have 2 different counties doing the paging. Just FYI we have a Zetron paging unit. I’m getting more confused:(
Maybe its no big deal, they will have to run it through our Zetron, but we still feel we need to scan wide and narrow on the same scan, at least till everyone as switched. Or maybe give up some advance notice. My head is starting to hurt.
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As far as paging is concerned, I would be inclined to program the pagers for wide band since both wide band and narrow band signals may be received. As Ted pointed out, the only problem that occurs is when you try to receiver the wider bandwidth signals on a narrow band receiver.
A narrowband transmission received on a wideband radio will have somewhat less audio and slightly less range, but probably not enough to affect operations.
Now - a two-way radio may be a different story. I would try programming the radio for wideband receive and narrowband transmit, if possible. It may not be; from my recollection the Kenwood 90 series does not have the capability of controlling transmit and receive bandwidth independently, but I don't know about the newer Motorola radios. You will probably have to have two channels for the same frequency, one wide and one narrow.
Your Zetron is just an audio tone generator; the wide/narrow part is the base station to which it is connected. If you go narrow-band the most you would have to do (assuming your paging format remains the same) is to lower the audio level into the base station.
Now MY head is starting to hurt.
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