Microwave ring key to city’s AWIN plan

The Arkansas Wireless Information Network’s limited reach into and out of downtown gave the committee responsible for recommending a new communication system for the city pause about anointing AWIN, but a solution emerged that made the state-run platform the best choice.

Hot Springs Fire Chief Ed Davis, who headed the Project 25 Communications System Evaluation Committee, said earlier this week the city is in negotiations with the Arkansas Career Training Institute to put a microwave dish on the campus.

Located in the former Army and Navy General Hospital that commands upper Central

Avenue, ACTI’s strategic perch was critical to the committee’s decision.

“With the current tower configuration, (AWIN) did not project well into downtown Hot Springs,” Davis said. “One of the things we had a lot of trepidation about going with AWIN at that time was the fact that it didn’t provide good coverage in places in the city.”

Davis said AWIN’s limitations were evident during the Confederate monument rally in August, when Arkansas State Police personnel had difficulty communicating on their AWIN radios.

Adding microwave dishes and antenna arrays atop the ACTI building, the cell tower in the 3000 block of Central Avenue, the city-county tower on West Mountain, the tower that will be built at the police department dispatch center and a new AWIN site proposed north of Fox Pass Cutoff should close coverage gaps, Davis said, facilitating communication with a high degree of reliability for city public safety personnel and linking them to the AWIN communications core in Little Rock.

Radio traffic will determine which tower in the microwave ring has the strongest signal for receiving transmissions, which all of the towers will then broadcast simultaneously.

“Since we’re at a point now where we can afford to establish tower sites, I think we’re going to have a radio system of immense quality,” Davis said. “It will do a good job of penetrating into older buildings. The ACTI site we’re proposing offers some of the best building penetration. It’s a direct shot into places like the Arlington, Medical Arts Building, Dugan-Stuart Building and any of those older legacy buildings where we have radio issues.”

Davis said bidirectional amplifiers that rebroadcast radio signals at a higher wattage will still be needed for radio signals to reach the basements of many downtown buildings.

The $4.9 million contract the committee negotiated with Motorola Solutions includes 551 AWIN-capable radios. Davis said the police and fire departments will get 125 and 74 single-band, handheld radios, respectively. Each departments’ officer corps will get 25 handheld multiband radios that can operate across numerous frequencies.

“We want tactical operations to stay on AWIN, with just command operations possibly venturing into other parts of the spectrum,” he said.

The total also includes 96 single-band, handheld radios for nonpublic safety personnel.

The radios will operate across 10 talk paths on the six

800-MHz channels currently licensed to the city. Five channels can support two talk paths, with the sixth dedicated to the control function that allocates talk paths among the talk groups. Davis said none of the paths will be designated for specific groups.

“This system will not be set up to have pre-emption, where one person would be able to have a greater ability to access a channel than another,” Davis said. “Everyone is going to be operating at the same level. With

10 different talk paths, I think we’ll have more than enough capacity to be able to deal with the normal traffic.”

According to correspondence Motorola sent the city earlier this month, only 40 police handheld radios will be capable of receiving encryption keys remotely. The other radios have an encryption function that can shield their broadcasts from the public, but encryption keys will have to be entered manually.

“All of them could be encrypted,” Davis said. “It’s not that big of a deal to do it, but I believe the police department has decided their special operations team radios will be the ones encrypted. The police department would set up the SWAT team and departments like that with it.”

The contract includes $569,170 for console equipment at the police department’s dispatch center.

According to Motorola’s correspondence, the size of the city’s order resulted in a $2.2 million discount. The total $3.6 million discount includes $750,000 for the trade in of the city’s existing Motorola Smartnet system and a $400,000 reduction for customer loyalty.

The Hot Springs Board of Directors is expected to vote on the contract next month. Davis said the system should be operational by next October.