Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Casa Grande police radios, cars at top of list for city purchase

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 23:07:47 -0400

CG police radios, cars at top of list for city purchase

By HAROLD KITCHING, Casa Grande Dispatch (AZ.) May 19, 2003

A companion proposal is to replace six patrol sedans at a cost of $195,750.
Both proposals, totaling $495,750, would be financed through lease/purchase.

The term would be three years for the cars and 10 years for the microwave communications
system. In the case of the microwave, the lease time "is well below the useful life
average of this particular equipment," Finance Director Larry Rains told the City Council
at Thursday night's session of a continuing series of meetings on the proposed budget for
fiscal year 2003-04. The microwave upgrade, City Manager Ken Buchanan said, is one of
several improvement projects being proposed because, "we don't feel that we're going to
get through the year without doing them.

"With the microwave repeater system, it's already crashed, they've already told us they
can't find parts for it. It's on its last legs." It has been continual frustration of
trying to patch together a working system, Police Chief Robert Huddleston told the
council.

The entire project would cover four sites in the area that the department uses as
communications relay points.
"We have a repeater up on Casa Grande Mountain that we communicate with from our base
station with a microwave dish that has failed," Huddleston said.

"We've abandoned that link and moved the repeater temporarily to our base tower here at
the Police Department."
That causes another problem, because the repeater on Casa Grande Mountain is able to
spread the signal to all areas of the city. With the radio tower at the department at a
lower level, the signal isn't as strong, cutting down the distance in which it can be
effective.

"We also have around town at three different locations voter-receivers that pick up lower
signal transmissions, the hand-held walkie-talkies, and then send that signal back to the
base station at the PD," Huddleston said.
In this case, the voter-receivers are voting no.

"In the past we have used phone lines to transmit that signal from the voter-receiver back
to the PD and they have proved extremely unreliable," Huddleston said.

"If there's any kind of wear and tear on the phone line or any kind of moisture in the
line we get signal degredation and we lose the signal.

The project would put up microwave dishes at all four locations, Huddleston said,
replacing the broken microwave and the phone lines to the voter-receivers. Mayor Chuck
Walton said complaints are being heard around the state that there is often no way to
communicate between law-enforcement departments.

He asked if the upgraded microwave system would solve the problem in this area.
"As far as agency interoperability, in itself, no," Huddleston said.

"It won't bridge any of those gaps, but it does strengthen our infrastructure, and the
theory is that the stronger our infrastructure is the more capable we are going to be able
to communicate with those other agencies in the future."

The problem is that the Casa Grande and surrounding area police department use VHF radio
frequencies, while the Arizona Department of Public Safety remains on another band.

Huddleston said there have been discussions with the DPS about the possibility of that
agency installing a system known as ACU 1000 in this area "that literally bridges that gap
under the right circumstances."

"It wouldn't be quite as simple as flipping a switch," Huddleston said, "but it does
provide a mechanism to where if there is a long-term operation going on down here, that
our dispatch would be able to fairly easily patch calls back and forth between the two
agencies.
"Here in Pinal County we are very fortunate along the lines of interagency operability of
communications in that all of the local agencies all operate on VHF radio frequencies, and
we can readily talk to Pinal County, to Coolidge, to Eloy, to Florence just by changing
the channels in our mobile.

"The weak link is DPS," Huddleston said, "and I don't know if there's anything on the
horizon that's going to make that connection easy and readily available to the field units
on moment's notice, but we do seem to be getting closer to being able to provide that
communication on major events."

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=8061852&BRD=1817&PAG=461&dept_id=68561&rfi=6

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