City drops ACTI building as AWIN repeater site

The Sentinel-Record/Grace Brown NEW LOCATION NEEDED: The exterior of the Arkansas Career Training Institute is shown on Sunday. The former Army and Navy General Hospital's uncertain future has delayed the rollout of the city's $5 million public safety communications system. One of the system's three primary repeater stations was being installed on the ninth floor when the state decided to close the building at the end of the year.
The Sentinel-Record/Grace Brown NEW LOCATION NEEDED: The exterior of the Arkansas Career Training Institute is shown on Sunday. The former Army and Navy General Hospital's uncertain future has delayed the rollout of the city's $5 million public safety communications system. One of the system's three primary repeater stations was being installed on the ninth floor when the state decided to close the building at the end of the year.

The former Army and Navy General Hospital's uncertain future has delayed the rollout of the city's $5 million public safety communications system.

Hot Springs Fire Chief Ed Davis said testing was expected to start next month, but the state's plan to abandon the building at the end of the year creates a gap in the microwave relay network critical to projecting radio signal strength. One of the system's three primary repeater stations was being installed on the ninth floor when the state decided to close the building at the end of the year.

Arkansas Rehabilitation Services, the state agency overseeing the Arkansas Career Training Institute residential workforce training program that's been housed at the building since the federal government deeded it to the state in 1960, told local officials last week that no funding is in place to provide electricity to the building after the first of the year.

Davis told City Manager Bill Burrough in a July 26 letter that owing to the age of the building's electrical system, it's unlikely it could be brought back online after being out of service for an extended period. With a power supply for the repeater uncertain, the city chose to look for another location.

"We had chosen the ACTI building based on the performance of the microwave relay and also in projecting radio frequency signals," Davis said Friday. "It's one of the better places we could pick for downtown Hot Springs and the Highway 70 east area. It was a really good fit for the system.

"It's a shame it didn't work out for us, but we couldn't justify making that kind of an investment in a building that's future is in doubt."

The move will delay switching communications to the new radio system until a new site is identified. Burrough told the Hot Springs Board of Directors during its biannual retreat earlier this month that new locations, including Levi Towers, Mountain View Towers and The Hotel Hot Springs & Spa, are being scouted.

"We've contacted all the property managers, and they're all in agreement to let us move that microwave to that facility," he said. "We don't think Levi Towers will facilitate an adequate path to other relays we have. It's the most undesirable at the moment. Other host sites are being identified and evaluated."

Davis said Friday that the project vendor's engineers did a walk-through of potential locations earlier this month.

"They're analyzing each site to determine which will be the best fit for us," he said. "It's a combination of being able to support transmissions of the microwave relay and radio frequencies and being able to house the equipment that supports it."

The ACTI building's strategic perch overlooking downtown Central Avenue convinced the city's Project 25 Communications System Evaluation Committee of the viability of an Arkansas Wireless Information Network-based system.

AWIN is the interoperable state-run platform used by more than 900 federal, state and local agencies. It was one of three proposals vendors submitted in 2017 after the city made upgrading its communications system a priority, but AWIN's spotty coverage downtown made the committee reluctant to recommend it to the city board.

Its limitations showed during the Confederate monument rally in August 2017, when the city said Arkansas State Police personnel had difficulty communicating on their AWIN radios. Putting a microwave dish on the ACTI building was seen as a way to close the coverage gap, allowing radio signals to reach into and out of downtown and penetrate older structures such as the Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa, Medical Arts Building and Dugan Stuart Building.

Motorola Solutions, the state's AWIN contractor, also submitted a proposal for a proprietary, self-contained system the city would have been responsible for maintaining. Harris Corp., the other vendor that responded, proposed a proprietary system.

The 2.6 mills the board levied during the 2016 and 2017 tax years raised $3.57 million for the project, the city finance department said. Another $1.59 million was appropriated from the solid waste, water and wastewater funds.

The project also calls for microwave relays on cell towers in the 3000 block of Central Avenue and the ridgeline north of Fox Pass Cutoff. The three-sided microwave ring will be completed by the downtown relay, underpinning a system the city said promises greater coverage, capacity and reliability.

"The relay is what makes it possible to poll each site for the best signal strength to support a radio transmission," Davis said. "It's a neat process. (Time Division Multiple Access) is the foundation on which the system rests. It's the ability of any given device to be able to access and find which repeater will serve it best."

The $5 million contract with Motorola includes about 600 radios and 10 talk paths on six 800-MHz channels. Five channels can support two talk paths, with the sixth dedicated to the control function that allocates talk paths among the talk groups.

Local on 08/19/2019

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