Two meetings will be held to introduce the new radio system to emergency response groups this week.

The first is at 6:30 p.m. today, and the second is at 9 a.m. Thursday. Both are at the Marion Ross Performing Arts Center.

Freeborn County Sheriff Mark Harig said there is an aggressive schedule to implement Allied Radio Matrix for Emergency Response, also known as ARMER.

The meeting is intended for law enforcement, fire and emergency responders, and for other city and county officials. The public is welcome to attend.

The meetings will include a 60-minute PowerPoint slideshow by Dan Nohr, a Motorola Inc. employee who’s worked with ARMER for 12 years. He will introduce the ARMER system, and there will be time for questions and other comments afterward. The meetings are 90 minutes each.

Freeborn County Sheriff Mark Harig said it’s important to have input from all the groups involved as Motorola and county officials begin planning and talk groups, which will replace traditional channels.

A great deal of planning and organization is required to implement the digital radio system. Emergency response units across the county will play a key role in determining how parts of the system operate.

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 talk groups for each fire department, and fire departments and first responders in small towns often combine to make one talk group.

The number of talk groups can vary and will depend on the needs in the county, so feedback from all the emergency groups involved will be important.

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

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. 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.

The planning will continue for much of the summer. County officials are arranging a conference call with a grant-writing specialist, and they plan to meet with the Minnesota Department of Transportation in the next few weeks.