Firm Eyed for County Radio
P.J. Reilly, Intelligencer Journal/New Era (Lancaster, Pennsylvania)
Marvin Ingram admits he’s in a different world.
Sitting in his office in a converted house at North Penryn and Doe Run roads just east of Manheim’s town square, the Annapolis, Md., resident finds it strange hearing the clip-clop of horses pulling Amish buggies outside.
“It’s weird,” Ingram said. “They go up and down the road any time of the day.”
What isn’t weird for Ingram, the senior director of public safety communications for Annapolis-based ARINC, is the job he’s been doing from his Penn Township office since it opened a year ago.
Working to build a radio system.
“We’ve put antennas in Siberia and the South Pole,” Ingram said. “Our global communication systems are on every continent in the world.”
ARINC recently was tapped by the Lancaster County commissioners as the contractor County-Wide Communications will negotiate with to build a new $25 million emergency radio system here.
The system will replace one based on 1950s-era technology that is rife with problems, including dead spots and the inability for police, fire and emergency medical services crews to talk to each other.
Getting a new radio system in Lancaster County has been in the works for the past 13 years.
And ARINC is the second contractor to whom the county has tasked the project.
M/A Com Inc. of Lynchburg, Va., was hired in 2000 to build an 800 MHz radio system here.
But after eight years of delays and problems and spending $14 million, the commissioners terminated M/A Com’s contract and opted to move in a different direction.
The new system will operate on a television band, or T-band.
ARINC was founded in 1929 to provide a radio system for the aviation industry.
For the past 30 years or so, Ingram said, ARINC has developed military radio systems.
A decade ago, ARINC added public safety communications to its portfolio.
Ingram said ARINC’s engineers have spent the past year gathering data and building a model of a system it hopes to deploy in Lancaster County.
The recent vote taken by the commissioners authorized County-Wide Communications to negotiate with ARINC for a new system.
A contract to build the system still must be drafted and approved.
But the company must meet the county’s operational and pricing specifications to do so.
“We won’t know what the system actually costs until we sit down and get into the fine detail,” said Mike Weaver, director of County-Wide Communications.
ARINC’s biggest test will come this summer, when it must build a pilot system to operate in the city.
“That was very smart on the county’s part,” Ingram said. “They want to see if our system will work in a narrow environment before deploying it countywide.”
And that narrow environment, Ingram said, is the county’s most challenging.
“It’s the most densely populated, it’s got a lot of tall, tightly packed buildings and it’s got a lot of users that will be on the radio system,” he said.
ARINC’s plan, according to Ingram, is to build a pilot system that covers the entire city and allows for interoperability among police, fire, EMS and public works users with radios made by no fewer than five manufacturers.
“Our system is not going to tie the county to any one manufacturer,” Ingram said.
When fire companies, police departments and ambulance crews have multiple manufacturers to buy from, Ingram said, it keeps their radio costs down.
Weaver has pledged that his staff and a radio consultant hired by the county will test every facet of ARINC’s pilot system for a month this fall before deciding whether to move forward with a countywide system.
Ingram said he’s confident what the outcome will be.
“This is a complex system, and it takes a lot of focus from our side of things and the county’s side to get it right,” he said.
“Our goal is to get it right.”
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