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In January 2021, the PSERN Project Team will be directly contacting King County fire and police departments, as well as other agencies, with details of the Final Radio Inventory process. The purpose of the Final Radio Inventory is to conduct the final count of all radio equipment that will need to be purchased and then deployed to King County agencies. It is essential that the information collected is accurate to avoid unintended extra costs or impacts to agency operations. The process of collecting the Final Radio Inventory from all agencies will begin in January and last for approximately 2 mths.
Please take these steps to prepare for the PSERN Final Radio Inventory:
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Determine Needed Non-Standard Features/Functions: Please determine if your agency needs any non-standard features or functions. The updated Standard Radio Features and Functions overview sheet will be available soon on our website here. If you have questions on this topic, please contact the PSERN Technical Team via PSERN-INFO@kingcounty.gov.
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Update Your Agency Contact for Inventory: If you know that radio contacts at your agency and/or email addresses have changed since the 2019 Preliminary Radio Inventory, please consider proactively contacting PSERN-INFO@kingcounty.gov with your new contact information, including the new contact name, agency name, address, email address, and previous contact name.
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Identify Current Radios to Exchange: New PSERN radios will be exchanged for agency radios that are active on the KCERCS system and can be physically handed over to the PSERN Project Team. Start ensuring that your paperwork reflects the radios that you can put your hands on and that are active.
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One of the most critical aspects of the PSERN Project is verification that the radio equipment purchased provides the planned operational coverage throughout King County. When the radio network was designed, the coverage criteria was developed to significantly increase signal on the street, as compared to our current emergency radio communications system.
Beginning in February of 2021, the PSERN Project Technical Team will work with Motorola to test the new system. The first area to be tested is the primary bounded area (PBA), which includes the urban and suburban parts of metropolitan King County. This area is being tested first because it will cover nearly all radio end-users. Later in the year, we will test the three highway coverage areas (I-90, Hwy 2, and SR-410).
Several rigorous tests will occur, including:
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Measuring the Signal Strength: In the first of these tests, we will quantitatively measure the signal strength and quality against established standards throughout the coverage areas. The standards ensure that the digital signal is free of errors, which, if present, would cause a degraded signal.
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End-User Audio Quality Check: When the signal strength test is done, we will conduct a second test which is very similar to the old TV commercial asking, "Can you hear me now?". In this test, the human ear determines if the radio communication is understandable by the end-user, which is also an important measure of quality.
The County has been carefully divided into test tiles or areas, which equates to approximately five tests for every mile, or over 31,000 test areas. Testers will drive throughout these areas to perform the tests and record each test area as pass or fail. A test area passes only if it meets 97% of the signal strength measurement and the end-user audio quality check tests.
Given that we have more than doubled the number of radio sites in PSERN, compared to the current system, we believe the system has been designed to meet the 97% requirement for improved and expanded radio coverage.
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