InterceptRadio.com Forums

Last night, Island County Sheriff's department was engaged in a foot pursuit of an armed suspect on Camano Island. I guess the guy was wanted for a variety of felonies over the past few days, and had previously eluded them.

They requested additional resources from Snohomish County, including a K9. They got a response from Stanwood PD, WSP, and perhaps a couple of Sno County SO units. The only K9 on the air at that time was from Everett PD, and they did respond to Camano Island.

Initially, Stanwood PD was able to communicate directly with Island County SO units because they have UHF radios in their vehicles (they are normally on SNOPAC VHF, soon to be on 800mhz).

Everett PD does not have UHF, but they are on the Sno County 800 trunking system. The K9 officer asked SNOPAC for a patch to Island County, and the dispatcher complied...he patched PSOPS-N3 to Island County SO Main frequency (453.675). She immediately had direct communications with field units, and was able to interop/coordinate with them without much problem. In fact, her 800mhz radio generally sounded BETTER than the Island County SO units (ICSO's radio system isn't that great...).

On a couple of levels, their ability to interop with dis-like radio systems actually went rather well. If they had added a LERN patch to the mix, it would have even been that much better.

That was a good example how a bit of forward thinking and planning can go a long way to allow agencies to actually work together, and make these multi-million dollar radio system work to the benefit of the field user - instead of making them "paper-inerop" quagmires that really don't acomplish anything...

Oh - I didn't stick around to hear the end result, so I don't know if their efforts were successful or not.

Brad/N7JGX
Whidbey Island, WA

_________________
Whatever.....

Ya, the patch is still in place. I was wondering why I was hearing PD traffic on TG 60432. Although I have it labeled as "Fire Mutual AId". Not for sure how I got that.

Brad,
Thanks for the explanation. I was getting ready to ask here what was going on on PSOPS N3 when I did a browser refresh and saw your answer. I've just started Trunker so I can annotate the individual radio ID and see what Trunker shows as the patch status. I think they may have disabled the patch as I have heard nothing since about 10AM and it had a fair amount of traffic before that time.
DennisE -- N Everett

No, it's still going. I just heard some traffic on it. "47 & 49 are Robert"

You're right, it's still going. I just checked the talkgroup list on the BBS, and I wonder why they did not use the TG I see listed ~
60656 ISL SO MA - UHF patch to Island County
Or, maybe I misunderstand what this one is for. They are using ~
60432 PSOPS N3 - Mutual Aid (SNOPAC/MVD)

What does PSOPS stand for? And what does MVD in SNOPAC/MVD stand for?

As of 1310hrs, the patch appears to be disconnected.

I don't believe the Everett PD radios have the ISL SO MA talkgroup programmed in their radios...at least, the templates I'm familiar with do not have it. This TG may have been initially planned into the system, but later abandoned. I don't really know, but the PSOPS patch worked well.

Since both Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the Sno County system are now on the air, the field units have the benefit (at least on that talkgroup) of using resources on both Phases...so, if the field unit was on the east shoreline of Camano, they would be using the Phase 2 portion of the simulcast system (very likely, Fire Trail site). If they cross over to the west shore of Camano Island, then they may "roam" over to the Phase 1 part of the system (probably covered well by the South Whidbey site).

Bottom line, the folks at SERS recognized this kind of incident to be a possiblility, and integrated the 800mhz-to-453.675 patching capability into their system right away...and, it was there and working well when needed.
That's exactly the kind of "know your operational needs and support the field user" mentality that goes a long way to making these expensive communication systems shine.

_________________
Whatever.....

PSOPS = Public Safety Operations

PSOPS-N3 and N4 are on the Sno County System

PSOPS-S3 and S4 are on the Tacoma 800 system.

PSOPS-N1, N2, S1, and S2 are on the King County System.

All of the above are just talkgroups on their respective systems, and can be patched to other resources (talkgroups or conventional frequencies) to support a field operation. The PSOPS channels are NOT normally linked together in any way - however, Bellevue Eastside Communications did recently use the TRIS system to link King County's PSOPS-N2 to Sno County's PSOPS-N3 to support a multi-jurisdictional operation (simply because Bellevue's radio's were not able to access PSOPS-N3 on their own - long story...).


MVD may stand for "Marysville Dispatch".

_________________
Whatever.....