ANTIGO — The Village of White Lake was recently tied into the simulcast system that has been being developed to enhance radio communications among municipal law enforcement and emergency service agencies throughout Langlade County.
The addition, part of a concerted initiative to improve high speed internet coverage throughout the county, has improved radio reception for White Lake-area first responders, according to Langlade County Sheriff Mark Westen, who updated the county board’s public safety committee on the matter at its meeting Thursday morning.
“If their pager goes off or if there’s a radio transmission for White Lake people, they’re going to hear that countywide, whereas before, if they were just dialed into the White Lake tower and you migrate several miles away from the White Lake tower, they may not have heard those radio transmissions,” Westen said. “Now, because they’re connected to all these towers, the radio footprint is pretty much countywide versus just being right in the localized White Lake area. So if their chief happens to be in Antigo and there’s a fire page that goes out, they’re going to hear all that stuff in Antigo knowing that, ‘Hey, there’s something going on in my community. I need to get back.’”
Communication equipment was added to the base of the White Lake tower, according to Westen.
“There’s a repeater that was added for our law enforcement channel that gets tied into fiber optic equipment, and those fiber optic lines then feed all of the towers together. The fiber optic links those towers together to a single point where it comes into our dispatch center,” he said.
Ground-based fiber optic lines now connect several towers that public safety radio communications ping off of throughout the county.
“Previously, Kent tower was where our radio equipment was for law enforcement,” Westen said. “Now, we have Kent, Gresh, White Lake, and Summit. The Town of Summit’s going to be coming into play and also up in Elcho. So our footprint for radio communications, especially with portable radios, you can be out of your car and key up a portable radio and have a much higher success rate of actually transmitting something over a portable radio than we ever have had before. It’s been a game changer.”
The sheriff said some northern and western portions of the county still remain uncovered in the county-wide simulcast system.
“We don’t have a solid plan to bring the existing Pickerel tower into the simulcast,” he said. “There are other towers out in that area that more than likely, if we would contact the owners of those towers, there would be some pretty hefty fees for us to co-locate our equipment onto them because there had never been any previous agreements or arrangements to have that done. So it’s stuff that we’re going to look at, but right now, we need to focus on making sure we get the Town of Summit into the fray, and certainly that directional antenna on the Kent tower, if that is able to push a signal up to the Pickerel area that would be impactful, do we even need Pickerel to have their own tower? So those are things on the horizon that we’re looking at.”
Westen said solving those types of logistical issues with the system can sometimes be a balancing act.
“We still have some work to do to try to figure out how we’re going to either bring Pickerel into the system on the existing tower — which doesn’t look good because it is loaded up pretty heavy and there’s not a lot of room or options to increase the amount of equipment on that tower,” Westen said. “But we are also going to be having the Raycom company, which is our radio vendor, do a study for us to look at a directional shift in the Kent tower to try to do a directional signal that would be headed more towards Pickerel, which then would allow them to also increase the power at White Lake and to increase the power back here in Gresh. It’s a tightrope walk between how much power you can have on one tower and the other tower so that you don’t have overlapping signals. That creates a warbled signal if you have overlapping areas where two towers are competing for the same space.”
He described the addition of White Lake to the system as a major development.
“We did bring White Lake into the fold,” Westen said, “and that is a huge step in the right direction.”
Most Popular
Comments / 0