Wake Forest Builds Its Own 2-Way Radio System
Here’s how one North Carolina university overcame its radio coverage deficiencies.
Wake Forest University is a 7,000-student private school in Winston-Salem, N.C. The university employs a 31-officer fully staffed police department to monitor its gated campus and surrounding property that stretches 718 acres.
Solution Had to Support Several Technologies
Unlike the trunked 800 MHz county-wide system that WFU had been using, the VHF conventional radio system heavily depends on the dispatchers to route calls and setup patches between various systems, so it was important that WFPD find a public-safety grade radio console system that could support DMR, analog, 800 MHz trunking and the analog call boxes. The Wake Forest Police Department chose the Propulsion Console made by Catalyst Communications as the best solution to meet their needs, purchased through Mobile Communications.
Assistant Chief Kenneth Overholt of the Wake Forest Police Department took on the project management role for the radio and console system upgrade.
“Because of the construction of our buildings, the 800 MHz system was not performing well for us,” he says “The loss of communications from within some areas in our buildings put our officers at high risk so we had to do something to elevate officer safety.”
The new repeaters, consoles and radios began to be deployed in November of 2012. By December, the entire system was installed and testing began. Overholt says training his staff on the new system was quick and easy, estimating it took about a week of practice for officers to understand how to use the new features of the radios.
Coverage Challenges Solved
As predicted by radio propagation models, previous locations where the 800 MHz radios did not work were shown to be under full coverage, with the signal strength problems fully remediated by the DMR repeaters. There are now more than 90 DMR radios in use by WFPD today.
The dispatch consoles for the radios were configured using the flexible graphical user interface of the Propulsion consoles. Because of the flexibility of the consoles, the university police department was able to connect the DMR police channels, a tactical channel, a call box channel, an emergency medical services 800 MHz channel for EMS calls, a facilities channel and a channel for communications to an off-campus corporate center that is also university owned. The system allows the dispatchers to get the caller-id and alias from the field radios when they call in to dispatch.
Requests for emergency assistance, activated by officers pressing the portable radio emergency button, are indicated both graphically and audibly on the console and audibly to other officer radios. Preconfigured patches were established so that the dispatchers could easily connect the various radio channels of the different systems together by two quick touches on the touchscreen. The audio from every radio channel is recorded and made available to the dispatcher for instant recall listening from the console.
Additionally, the console software provides an IP interface to the university’s audio logging recorder system. This allows the Wake Forest Police Department to keep long term digital records of all conversations over any of the radio channels, giving the capability to re-create any normal or emergency call scenario that has taken place via the radio system.
Officers Like Recorded Audio
Overholt says the recorded audio feature has been especially helpful. “The recorded audio is what [my officers] like the most,” he explains. “They use it often, and it is extremely useful to be able to quickly review a previous radio transmission when other sounds in the communications office cover a radio transmission.”
There are other new features available as well with the console, including the ability to disable and re-enable field radios, send text messages to field radios, send alert tones over the air and to use a DTMF dialer pad to access the call boxes.
Overholt strongly suggests other agencies make the switch from analog to digital. He also believes that establishing a mutual aid agreement with a city police force can save a department a lot of money and improve interoperability.
New Radios Still Going Strong
It’s been more than two years since WFPD started using the new communications system, and today, whether it’s a football game, a dignitary visitation, a graduation ceremony or just a normal day on the campus, WFPD is prepared to communicate
via its radios and consoles to handle any emergency that arises.
Rich Lawrence is the system sales engineer for Catalyst Communications. Zach Winn is an associate web editor for Campus Safety Magazine.
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