Show All Answers
Cumberland County will cross patch the 800 MHz dispatch talk groups for Fire 1 and EMS Dispatch to the conventional Fire 1 and Med 10 legacy channels for monitoring purposes. Fire service and EMS personnel will still use their pagers and station monitor devices used in the old system for the receipt of dispatch information. The cross patch will enable users to monitor response of units from their stations and hear the communications until units start arriving on the scene. Operational talk groups may be assigned for the incident and these talk groups will not be able to be monitored on radio scanners.
Radio site failures – Occasional radio channels or sites could be lost without noticeable impact to the user and can be caused by acts of nature or normal maintenance requirements. All high profile sites have two or more channels (frequencies), and a loss of a single channel should not cause notice since each channel contains more than one voice slots. A single channel site or a complete radio site loss could reduce in building and some on street portable coverage. The radio system with its multiple site design provides overlaying mobile radio coverage in most of the county, usually from two or more sites, and VTAC operations can support portable use in a building.
Voice switch failure – The radio system incorporates redundant switches – one operating as a primary and the other as a hot standby. If the primary switch should fail, the back-up will take over operations and the system outage during the failover will last 15 – 30 seconds. If a full network failure should occur, four high profile sites will revert to local repeater operations (single site trunking). The communications center is provisioned for control stations pointed to these sites and will maintain operations on the primary dispatch talk groups of Police East, Police West, Fire and EMS dispatch.
A last resort option is the National Public Safety Planning Advisory Committee (NPSPAC) mutual aid plan repeaters. This plan identifies five conventional 800 MHz radio channels (one hailing and four tactical channels) to be used nationwide for mutual aid purposes. The Commonwealth of PA installed the hailing and two of the tactical channels at their Resser’s Summit radio site south of New Cumberland. Cumberland County installed the two remaining tactical channels – one at South Mountain radio site and one at Three Square Hollow radio site. The combination of these sites provides mobile radio coverage to most of the County. While the intent of this plan is to provide common communications capabilities for disparate trunking technologies it could be used for a major network outage. All of Cumberland County Police, Fire, and EMS OpenSky radios are provisioned with the NPSPAC mutual aid plan and the training program provides information on how to access this mode in the radio.