Huntley Site Restored

The Huntley site is now back on line after AT&T made temporary repairs to the T1 line that was taken down earlier today. AT&T reports they will need to return on Tuesday May 31st to completely replace the line. They will notify us before the work begins as it will take the site down for approximately 45 minutes.

Huntley Rd Site Down

At 11:22am today a truck struck the telephone company facilities (overhead lines) in front of the Huntley Rd tower site taking down the T1 connection between the site and Worthington PD. XO Communications, our T1 provider at this site, has been notified and is dispatching crews for the repair (ticket #2315471).

Although the site is off line, coverage in Worthington is back up by the Hard Road and Lazelle Road tower sites. Other than reduced fringe area and minor in building coverage issues, the users will see no interruptions in service.

A message will be posted when the site is returned to full service.

 

OARNet Maintenance

OARNet will be conducting maintenance on the network during the overnight of April 25th and the overnight of April 26th to "cut in" some new fiber optic connections. This may result periodic service interruptions of no more than 1 minute in length per outage. If there is an outage, the system will go into SITE TRUNKING and consoles will lose connectivity. Agencies can continue using the system when it is in site trunking mode. Dispatchers will need to use walkies or back up control stations during site trunking.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Jay Somerville.

Governing Board Meeting

The next meeting of the COIRS Governing Board is scheduled for Friday April 22, 2011 at 9:30am at the Worthington Police Headquarters building, 6665 Worthington-Galena Road. CLICK HERE for a copy of the meeting agenda.

For more information about the meeting, or to submit an item for the agenda, please contact Jay Somerville

Are your accessories the right fit?

Much thought, research and consideration is put into selecting the right radio for the job. Will it be rugged enough? Is it intrinsically safe? Do the controls, buttons and knobs work well with gloves on? But do you give the same amount of consideration to the accessories you use with your radios?

One area of concern, especially to fire agencies, is the remote speaker microphone. Many agencies have not given much thought to speaker mics, treating them as "disposable" items. But is that speaker mic up to the harsh environment of firefighting or law enforcement?

The Shaker Heights Fire Department recently experienced problems on the fireground with a radio that would continually key up and block other traffic, only to discover the problem was with a speaker mic that had gotten wet. Although they had purchased "water resistant" mics, they in fact needed "water proof" mics.

Shaker Heights did internal testing of their current speaker mics and confirmed their theory: water proof mics are preferred on the fireground. CLICK HERE to read a copy of their report.

Lightning Strike at Huntley Road

During the storms in the early morning hours of Monday February 28th, it appears that the Huntley Road site took a lightning hit and was knocked off the air. The site was brought back on line on Wednesday March 2nd at approximately 5pm after replacing the channel bank cage, the #2 WAN card and a poly-phaser. Also damaged in the storm was the interface board for the stand by generator and the mid-tower lighting. Repairs are in progress on those two systems.

During the outage, there was a minor loss of coverage in some areas. Users did not report any issues as the overlapping coverage of the Lazelle Road tower was used by allowing the Worthington talk-groups to roam onto the Delaware side of the system during the outage.

The cost of this outage is still be calculated.

Governing Board Meeting

The next meeting of the COIRS Governing Board is set for Friday January 21st at 9:30am at Worthington PD. CLICK HERE for a copy of the meeting agenda.

For more information about the meeting, or to submit an item for the agenda, please contact Jay Somerville.