Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Greenwood police on new radios again

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 23:26:37 -0500

Greenwood police on new radios again
Wednesday, March 26, 2003
By BRYAN CORBIN
Daily Journal news editor, [email-masked]

March 27, 2003

Nine months after pulling out of the countywide police-radio network, Greenwood police are
once
again using high-tech digital radios to communicate.

Greenwood police switched back Friday, now that a Greenwood cellular tower is boosting
their
radio signals, correcting the signal loss that plagued the system early last year.

Concerned that communications failures were endangering officers and the public, Police
Chief
Albert Hessman had ordered the then-new digital radios switched off June 22, five months
after
they were activated. Greenwood officers have been using their old analog radios since
then.

With the problem fixed, Hessman ordered officers to reactivate the handheld digital
radios. They
now work as intended, he said.

“It’s improved vastly over what we had,” he said. “It’s the difference between night and
day.”

Twelve police and six fire departments in Johnson County, including Greenwood, formed a
consortium in the late 1990s to create a unified police-fire radio system. The idea was to
use the
same radio frequency — 800 megahertz — and compatible radio equipment so they could
communicate more efficiently in an emergency or disaster. Johnson County was to be the
first
county in a proposed statewide police-radio system, called Project SAFE-T.

Funded through a $5.1 million bond issue, the new countywide system started broadcasting
in
January 2002. Signals from officers’ and firefighters’ handheld radios bounce off radio
towers in
Franklin and Mooresville.

Police and firefighters in and near Franklin had little trouble. From the start, however,
Greenwood
police officers had difficulty hailing their dispatchers on the new radios or calling for
assistance.

Part of the problem, officials found, was that Greenwood is too distant from the two
towers to
permit clear signals. A glitch in a digital interface unit also contributed to the
problem, said Alvin
Hayes, spokesman for Project SAFE-T.

The system’s contractor, Motorola, fixed the technical glitch. And devices that boost
radio signals,
called repeaters, were installed on a cellular tower at Main Street and State Road 135.
Greenwood
officers’ handheld radios were reprogrammed for that tower.

Recent tests by Motorola were encouraging, particularly in enclosed areas that might block
radio
signals, such as Greenwood Park Mall.

“They went to the deepest door, the furthest stockroom they could find,” Hessman said of
the
testing. “It was working; it was doing its thing.”

Testing continues, but Greenwood officers haven’t encountered major problems reaching
their
dispatchers or other officers on the handheld radios.

“I have noticed massive improvement in the clarity of transmission. It’s a lot better than
it was,”
Hessman said.

One officer reported poor sound quality on his radio. Changing the battery pack fixed
that,
Hessman said.

“No system is going to be 100 percent, and I understand that,” he said.

The costs of leasing the cell tower were borne not by Greenwood police but by the state.

Long term, the goal is for all 92 counties to convert to the unified radio system.
Hendricks and
Montgomery counties are now implementing such systems. The problems Greenwood
encountered haven’t occurred there, Hayes said.

“Once those glitches were identified, Motorola worked diligently to ensure it doesn’t
happen again,”
he said.

http://www.thejournalnet.com/Main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=211&ArticleID=35064

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