Radio upgrade finally arrives

The Wahkiakum County Emergency Responder Radio System (WCERRS) project is underway and progressing ahead of schedule. The system being replaced had its last major upgrade in 2005. This system costs us about $2,000 per month to continue making temporary patches to keep it going. It has real holes in its coverage, requiring responders to change frequencies when moving around the county and to also act as relay stations for some parts of the county.

The new system is expected to go live in November 2024. It is funded by a congressional appropriation of $1,595,000, 2/10 of 1% sales tax from our county, and a $350,000 system expansion transfer from EMS. We are replacing all of the repeaters on our five towers and all of the handheld radios for our emergency responder partners (Wahkiakum Sheriff, Fire/EMS, PUD, County and Cathlamet public works, Health and Human Services and the Wahkiakum school district.) We are also replacing the dispatch and 911 system, and have all new repeater frequencies to increase interoperability capability. We are reprogramming all the current vehicle and base station radios to include all the new programming for each emergency responder agency.

The new system will greatly increase our coverage to include areas bordering Pacific and Cowlitz counties and most of the way up all of our many valleys. There will be five county-wide repeater frequencies on the five towers that all responder radios use to automatically send and receive from the best tower. For normal communications, each responder group has their own band of channels to use locally, plus access to all five of the repeater channels for county-wide communications. For big emergencies all of the radios on the system are easily repurposed as needed by the county Emergency Operations Center and coordinated by the county dispatch system.

Sheriff Jon Mason said, "I am excited about the progress made in the radio project and looking forward to the advancements in technology and service that will be provided to the community. Our project manager, Beau Renfro, has been working very hard to successfully implement an otherwise

years-long process into months of work".

This project design and implementation is being led by the Sheriff's Office, facilitated by Beau Renfro, with every responder agency represented on the planning steering committee. The county

commissioners maintain oversight on all facets of the project. In future articles we will take a deeper dive into the equipment that makes the system work, and how the system works for our emergency responder agencies.

If you have questions regarding this project, you may contact Beau Renfro at 360-795-7878 or renfrob@co.wahkiakum.wa.us