Freeborn County emergency response groups took their first step last week in replacing the countywide radio system with one that improves communication both in the county and with other emergency groups throughout the state.

“Communications has been our downfall the entire 37 years I’ve worked for the Sheriff’s Office,” said Freeborn County Sheriff Mark Harig.

After the Federal Communications Commission mandated that wideband very high frequency systems be replaced or converted to narrowband VHF systems by 2013, the Freeborn County Board of Commissioners voted to approved a conversion to the Allied Radio Matrix for Emergency Response, also known as ARMER.

Harig, Police Chief Dwaine Winkels and others met with representatives from Motorola, Inc., the project contractor, Thursday to kick off the conversion and begin work on a project proposal that will be approved by the Minnesota Department of Transportation and other state agencies.

ARMER is a statewide system designed to include all emergency response teams in a county, including the Albert Lea Police Department, Freeborn County Sheriff’s Department, Albert Lea Medical Center, Albert Lea Fire Department and 16 fire departments and first responders throughout the county.

ARMER is designed to improve interoperability amongst emergency responders throughout the state. For example, ARMER will improve how police officers communicate with the officer in their department, and Harig said it will improve how police officers coordinate efforts with other emergency response teams in neighboring counties, the Minnesota State Patrol and other agencies throughout the state.

“This will give us a lot more channels, and some of those channels will be regional, and some of them will be state. So we’ll have state channels where we can talk amongst the state. Regional ones that we can go out of the state, so if we get called to Iowa, we can talk to them,” Harig said.

With the mandate to end all wideband VHF transmissions by 2013, many other counties in the state will switch over to ARMER before 2013. The 800 megahertz communications system is already being used by the Minnesota State Patrol and by emergency response teams in the Twin Cities, Rochester and St. Cloud.

“It’s been up and running in the metro area for a while now, and by god it works,” said James Sobey, presale business manager with Motorola.

In this first phase, Motorola will find out how many radios are currently being used both by emergency workers and in vehicles in Freeborn County. Eventually, all the radios carried by emergency workers and installed in emergency vehicles will be replaced by radios that can communicate with the digital ARMER system. Some radios purchased recently can be converted to work with the digital system.

The estimated cost of the project is $3.6 million, but Harig said he thinks grant money will make up much of that.

Talk groups

County officials and Motorola will work to set up talk groups.

Police and other emergency response units will no longer communicate through traditional radio channels. They will communicate through assigned talk groups.

All communication will filter through a digital trunked radio communications system. This means when someone uses his or her radio, the call will filter through a computer that selects an available channel for that talk group to communicate on.

One talk group could be set up for the police department, and another could be set up for the fire department. There won’t necessarily be a talk groups for each fire department, and fire departments and first responders in small towns often combine to make one talk group.

There are also state and regional talk groups to coordinate efforts with groups outside the county during emergencies.

A talk group could be set up for the Albert Lea Police Department. When a police officer communicates through his or her radio, only police officers in that group will hear that message. The computer will recognize each radio and the talk group it’s associated with, and then it will select an available channel whenever the talk group communicates.

Sobey compared the system to waiting in line at a bank to talk to a teller: You don’t select a teller to help you; the first available teller helps you. This is how the computer assigns talk groups to an available channel.

Analog and VHF police scanners will no longer operate. Digital scanners will work, but they’ll only hear the talk groups as they are selected for a channel. The digital scanners will be set to one channel, but that scanner will cycle through various talk groups as the computer assigns them to that channel, so each communication will be from a different group. Certain talk groups will be encrypted, so tactics and other information won’t be heard by the public.

Motorola will work with the Minnesota Department of Transportation on simulations to determine how many channels will be needed to meet the load of the various talk groups, so no one has to wait for a channel.

Improved communication

Harig also said ARMER will improve radio communication in areas of the county where officials have often lost signal. Police officers and firefighters have often lost radio contact in the past in certain buildings and in the outskirts of the county. After a bank robbery in 2003, Harig said officers had a difficult time communicating with dispatchers in the Freeborn area when they captured a suspect.

“In our world with VHF, the old system, we have a lot of dead spots where you get into terrain where there’s a dip or a hill,” Harig said.

The goal is to have 95 percent coverage 95 percent of the time over all areas of the county.

ARMER communication towers are already in place near Alden, Geneva and Oakland, but there are preliminary plans to add ARMER communication systems to an existing tower near Glenville and to another at the Law Enforcement Center in Albert Lea.

The Glenville tower will improve communication in southern portions of the county and into Iowa. The Albert Lea tower will improve communication in buildings in Albert Lea, especially downtown.

Harig said the new communication will also benefit firefighters, because they need strong communication equipment when they go into a building to fight a fire.

Emergency officials have had difficulty with radio signal in certain buildings in town, especially Northbridge Mall, Albert Lea Medical Center and Albert Lea High School.

“You get into some of the businesses of the metal buildings, and you don’t have very good signal. You try to call and dispatch can’t hear you. If you’re in a bar fight, and you can’t talk to anyone, you’re on your own because they don’t know what’s going on,” Harig said.

There are currently five channels through each of the three existing towers. Sobey said one or two channels will likely be added at each tower, and an upwards of 12 channels would need to be added if two new towers went up.

Harig said Freeborn County is ahead of many counties in Minnesota in this process since the county already had GeoComm review their systems, while many groups are looking to do that now. The conversion takes about a year to 18 months from start to finish, and Harig said he hopes the system is operating by 2011 or 2012.