Ingham County 9-1-1 Central Dispatch sought a Technical Advisor/Project Manager to oversee and coordinate the construction, installation and initial operation of the County’s P25 700/800 MHz Project. The County had entered into a contract with Motorola to deploy a County-wide 9-site, 21-channel simulcast system that will be integrated into the State of Michigan Public Safety Communications System (MPSCS) and sought assistance with project implementation.
Project Tasks
During the multi-year implementation and integration project, Televate assisted the County with:
- Coordinating day-to-day activities and communications between the various Project Managers and Ingham County 9-1-1 Center Administration.
- Reviewing and evaluating the proposed system DDP (Detailed Design Plan), Technical/Functional Requirements, and Implementation Plans (Schedule, Budget, Work Statements) and assisting with specification changes.
- Assuring all necessary approvals for tower acquisition/location/leases and required regulatory approvals were obtained.
- Actively taking part in system performance evaluations and acceptance testing, to ensure that the system meets the specified contractual and performance requirements.
- Maintaining documentation to ensure system performance and contract compliance.
- Reviewing all payment requests and confirm invoiced costs are reasonable and cover work which has been performed in accordance with the contract requirements.
Project Accomplishments
As part of the comprehensive project support, Televate addressed these key items:
- Site acquisition facilitation: Televate developed a detailed site information and equipment matrix to facilitate the site acquisition, tower mapping and structural analysis process. The matrix served as a comprehensive site and lease management tool throughout the project.
- Televate assisted with initial site visits, preparation of lease applications and review of lease documents and terms and conditions.
- Televate developed a plan and coordinated the activity to receive approval from one of the site owners for a temporary loading exception, which permitted use of the tower through the system transition while avoiding an expensive tower upgrade.
- Televate performed a vendor proposal and contract review and analysis that identified key items for review and clarification and assisted with renegotiations of a more comprehensive and challenging coverage test procedure.
- Televate participated in and oversaw the extensive coverage acceptance test that yielded 99.9% positive results and a seamless system cut-over.
- Televate coordinated the decommissioning and removal of all legacy equipment following successful cut-over to the new system.
Key Project Milestones
The Ingham County System became the first sub-system of the extensive State of Michigan Public Safety Communications System to implement these key network features:
- The GeoPrime feature which incorporates a geographically redundant Prime site to ensure continued system operation even in the event of a catastrophic failure of the primary Prime site location.
- The geolocation feature that monitors and maps the location of system users as they respond to an incident. The user’s location can be monitored periodically or based on key events such as activation of the emergency button or whenever the user transmits over the radio (location on push-to-talk [PTT]).
- The enhanced data feature improves P25 data performance by enabling up to a 12x improvement in throughput.