Putnam County 911 working to replace old radio repeaters throughout the county.
911 Assistant Director Josh Womack said the county will order five repeaters so the department can replace three and save two as backups in case other repeaters go down. Womack said some of the department’s repeaters are at least ten years old and cannot be repaired anymore.
“Just knowing the age of them and starting to think ahead of, hey, this is something we need to do,” Womack said. “Everything’s working fine but we know, kind of that old adage, if it’s not broke don’t fix it, but then you know the other shoe’s going to drop and something’s going to happen.”
Womack said radio repeaters are used to boost a radio tower’s signal for the units responding out in the field. Womack said the department will spend some $50,000 for this first round of new repeaters. Womack said the plan is to budget for more replacements in the next fiscal year as there are nineteen repeaters that will need to be replaced eventually.
“In January I had two repeaters go down the same week,” Womack said. “So I had to buy one and then had some parts to fix the other one. So it’s time to go in and start doing this and start replacing those pieces of equipment.”
Womack said he plans to place the order this week and the repeaters should arrive in six to twelve weeks. Womack said it only takes about sixty to ninety minutes to prepare each new repeater and replace the old ones.
“Bring it in, put the programming into it and then go to the tower site itself and take the old one offline and put the new one online,” Womack said.
Womack said the department wants to stagger the additional purchases over a longer period of time and bring in the new repeaters in separate groups.
“We don’t want to do them all at once because if they all start to fail then we’re back in the same boat where they’ve all failed at once,” Womack said.
