I have been mulling this over for a couple of days The basic question I would like to tackle is - "What channels should be in the Burlington Massachusetts FD radios?"
The 2nd question would be - "How can the Burlington Massachusetts FD radio system be made better?" (There is no particular reason why we are looking at Burlington FD - they are just a typical USA suburban FD) Basic Idea Number 1 - no one can listen to two radios at once - no one can transmit 2 different messages at the same time - humans are just not capable of this Basic Idea Number 2 - there is already alot of money invested in radio gear - new radios are expensive - radio spectrum is not unlimited - radio budgets are not infinte - etc The present Burlington FD radio system is comprised of a 483.3625 repeater system and a 453.7625 repeater system. Each fire truck has 1 mobile radio and 3 or 4 portable radios. There is 1 repeater on each freq in Burlington. Burlington is approximately a 20 square mile town. There are no other fire repeaters located in Burlington AFAIK. There might be a fire mutual aid repeater in the next town over - Woburn - on the Metro North mutual aid fire channel - maybe 482.25. There are probably a few voted receiver sites throughout Burlington for 483.3625R. There might be a new MO3 on 453.25 in the Deputy Chief's vehicle. The 3 largest target hazards in Burlington are - Lahey Medical Center - Burlington Mall - ? Hilton Hotel. Each of these sites probably has 3 or 4 UHF repeater channels. There might be 20 other office or factory type buildings in Burlington that have campus radio systems. Burlington PD have a UHF repeater system at 482 Mhz. Burlington DPW uses a Mototrbo repeater on 159 Mhz. State Police use 800T. State Highways use maybe 47 Mhz or 800T or cellphones. (Rte 128 and Rte 3 are major highways that pass thru Burlington) Adjacent communities have police and fire radios on UHF. Where does this take us? 1. What are the major weaknesses of the current system? A. dead spots B. lack of channels C. difficulty of changing channels on radios D. feedback E. doubling F. lack of a dedicated mayday channel with associated infrastructure (Feb 18 2015 - 1157 AM - I just thought of Item F - maybe 483.3125R should be the dedicated Mayday channel for the Boston area - maybe 30 more remote receiver sites would be needed - ????) 2. What are the major strengths of the system? A. Better than yelling or using a loudspeaker B. familiarity - most users are familiar with the basic radio system C. lots of radio infrastructure is in place etc etc etc yadda yadda yadda To be continued ........ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "massfire" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/massfire. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
