Daviess County’s radio system is getting a multi-million dollar upgrade, as the decision was recently made to replace the current system in order to greatly improve communication among various emergency response agencies.
Daviess County Fiscal Court’s County Commissioners and Judge-Executive Al Mattingly made the decision last week to go with a countywide 700/800 MHz P25 trunking solution for the County’s new radio system. It is expected to increase from 67 percent outbound coverage to 95 percent.
County-wide departments — including the Sheriff’s Office, Fire Department, Emergency Management Agency and Detention Center — currently use five separate VHF conventional radio systems. The City of Owensboro utilizes a separate 800 MHz P25 trunked radio system for all City departments.
Trott Communications consulted with the agencies and said a county-wide P25 trunked radio system would provide the most feature-rich solution and would best address the overall needs and requirements of the system users — at a total cost of $5.7 million, including maintenance and upkeep.
“Due to the efficiency of trunking, more users and operational groups can be supported with fewer radio channels,” the report stated. “The county-wide P25 trunked system can be executed as an expansion of the existing City of Owensboro system or as independent Daviess County deployment.”
Mattingly said the process is likely to take around two years to fully implement. He said it’s never an easy decision to spend so much money, but the County decided a trunked radio system was a “no brainer” in the end.
“There were three options — the first was to continue what we were doing and replace them as they broke. That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “The second was to build a new system using VHF technology, which is what we’ve got now. We don’t get rid of the skip, we still have problems in getting [signal] in buildings, and it’s an old technology that’s going away.”
A new VHF system — which was the second option presented by Trott Communications — would have cost around $3.5 million. However, Fiscal Court chose to go with the technology that made better sense for the County’s present and future needs.
“It works out to about an additional $100,000 a year, for a much better system,” he said. “It gives much better building penetration, much better interoperability between the sheriff’s department, police department, two fire departments, our volunteer department, state police and all these other agencies,” he said. “While it’s a good chunk of money, it’s a no-brainer.”
