Consultant viewpoint

Mar 1, 2002 12:00 PM, Don Bishop

Lamoille County contracted RCC Consultants, Woodbridge, NJ, to help with its radio coverage problems.

An RCC engineer, Norm Boucher, said that several repeater sites would be required to provide reliable service to hand-held radios and for alert paging because of the county's mountainous terrain.

FCC rules about repeater power complicate the matter. Power reduction tables (the “Safe Harbor” tables) would require proposed high-elevation sites in Lamoille County to use transmitters limited to 5W to 10W ERP. Boucher said that using lower-elevation sites with higher power would require increasing the number of sites — and that would further increase the cost to the county.

“The balance point is very difficult to find,” Boucher said.

The county also needs more radio frequencies for full coverage. Boucher said it would be difficult to find sufficient VHF frequencies to fully implement their plan. He explained the Canadian government's assent would be required because of the county's proximity to Canada, and that the Canadian government typically rejects proposed U.S. frequency assignments along the border.

For fire department communications, Boucher explained that many of the county's small fire departments have radio systems that use repeaters with pole-mounted antennas in the fire yards that give limited coverage. The resulting lack of countywide coverage for firefighting makes tactical radio communications during mutual aid responses difficult.

Boucher said that the county routinely uses a mutual aid channel to dispatch fire departments for three or four communities. The RCC study found that the channel has 60 co-channel users. Boucher said that at any given time, usually someone is talking on the channel, making it a poor choice for dispatching.

Although RCC indicated that some VHF channels might otherwise be available to the county and suitable to use in improving its radio operations, Boucher said that more research would be needed to verify that the channels are usable. And even then, the routine rejection of U.S. coordination requests for VHF operations by the Canadian government would have to be overcome.