Florida county completes communications projects to enhance public-safety capabilities

Polk County also has UHF and VHF radio assets that were subject to the FCC narrowbanding mandate that required systems operating on frequencies below 470 MHz to migrate from 25 kHz channels to 12.5 kHz channels, Holycross said. In addition to performing this work on those radio systems—used by fire, EMS, corrections and facilities-management personnel—Polk County chose to upgrade the firefighting pager system, he said.

“We designed and built a countywide VHF digital paging system to do away with our old two-tone sequential analog system that was causing us a lot of grief,” Holycross said. “There are so many units now that respond. When you’re looking at five or six seconds to put out sequential tones for each of the units, it’s not unusual for it to take 45 seconds or more for a major event—a hospital fire alarm, a school fire alarm, or that sort of thing.

“Of course, that adds to the response time. It was just getting unwieldy. What we’ve done is put a digital paging system in place, and the CAD [computer-aided dispatch] system now sends that page out to the digital pagers, so the crews now have the call type, the address and all of that stuff right there in their hand.”

To complement this paging technology, Polk County revamped the system used to alert fire stations of a response, because the beeping of a pager may not awaken a sleeping firefighter in the hours after midnight, Holycross said. By integrating an 800 MHz control-station radio to the fire stations’ public-address system, a loud alert can be transmitted, he said.

“So, when a dispatcher is going to put out a call, the CAD system automatically will serve the digital page out,” Holycross said. “The dispatcher does a call alert to the effective control stations. They can notify 20 pieces of apparatus in about two seconds, versus five seconds for each set of tones [under the old system].

“That opens the PA [public-address] system in the firehouse. The dispatcher then hits a button that sends out an alert tone, which is broadcast throughout the station and will actually wake [the firefighters] up while issuing the voice dispatch. And, of course, by the time they get out of bed, the details are already on their pager. So, when they get on the truck, they’ve already got the address, the call type, the run number and all of that information. That eliminates a lot of voice traffic on the [radio] system.”