Narrowbanding and Unexpected Expenses

One of our little volunteer firefighter annoyances - deadlines. Worse, deadlines for mandates from above. Compounding annoyances - deadlines for two completely different things that become confused.

There is a presumptive January 1, 2012 deadline that has to do with GFSTC, the Georgia Firefighter Standards and Training Council. This is currently in draft stage and tightens up requirements for compliant fire departments in Georgia. We'll dispense with that for now.

And then there is this one: narrowbanding.

For non-Federal public safety users of radio communication, the NPSTC, the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council is mandating "narrowbanding". The nationwide deadline for this is Jan 1 2013:

In December 2004, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced the requirement that all non-Federal public safety licensees operating 25 kHz radio systems in the 150-174 MHz and 421-512 MHz bands (the VHF and UHF bands) must migrate to more efficient 12.5 kHz (narrowband) channels by January 1, 2013.

(BTW, and also from NPSTC, here is a nice description of "narrowbanding." Here is another good summation of the mandate.)

That 2013 deadline for everyone else comes for us in Oglethorpe County on January 1 2011. That seems to be because our county-wide emergency dispatch moved the deadline up, probably because much-needed changes to the transmission towers were going to be made (hurrah!), and it was decided to just do everything at once. I do believe that at least two or three folks understood this - it just got lost to me, anyway, in the conflation by the other deadlines. And if the significance was lost to me, who listens pretty carefully, it probably got lost to others too.

So "sometime in December," and December is moving along pretty swiftly now, there will come a day being called "Reprogramming Day," when everyone brings down their radios and pagers for reprogramming to the new 12.5 kHz standard. I don't know how up to a two or three hundred radios and pagers over thirteen different fire departments are going to be reprogrammed all on one day, but that's for someone else to worry about. The reason we want to do this is that the county pays for reprogramming, provided it's done on that Day. (Apparently there will be a Makeup Day, also unscheduled.)

A few complications. Older pagers and radios may not be able to be reprogrammed. New reprogrammable ones will then have to be purchased, and unless the reprogramming costs are rescheduled, they have to be purchased NOW. The county will be paying for the reprogramming, provided it's done on the appointed day(s), but it will not be paying for replacements.

Fortunately our Motorola CP200 and HT750 radios can be reprogrammed, although we have a number that must be repaired first, and that means NOW. All of our truck radios, Motorola CM200s, can also be reprogrammed. For other commonly used radios, here is a list, from Railcom, of radios and pagers that can and cannot be reprogrammed.

Unfortunately for us, *this* poses a problem:

That's our pager, a Motorola Minitor IV, one of the more popular pagers. We have close to twenty of these, and they will not be able to be reprogrammed. No one else is going to want them (this is a *federal* mandate) and so onto the junkpile they go. We do have a couple of next generation Minitor V pagers, and those can be reprogrammed. We've ordered six more of these, and that's going to cost us in the neighborhood of $3000.

A couple months ago, we put out a newsletter, a very good one. We discussed how it might be used for a specific fundraising request, but no one could think of anything coming up immediately. In the interim we have received generous donations (and compliments), enough to pay for the newsletter and then some. But clearly this unexpected, and for us very large expense should have been the focus, and it somehow fell through the cracks.

So, if you'd like to contribute to the Pager Replacement Fund, we'd very much appreciate it. Our mailing address is PO Box 76, Arnoldsville GA 30619. You can call or email Wolfskin Chief Ed Frey (phone numbers and addresses in the right sidebar near the top) to confirm.