No Smoke, no Mirrors

摘要

For Iowa County a recent upgrade to digital radio has delivered a spectacular boost in communications performance. Where previously it took many minutes to contact all the emergency forces, today the whole alerting process can be completed in seconds. In preparing for its digital rollout, which went live in August 2018, the county chose a hybrid system which combines Project 25 radio for voice communications with the DiCal digital message paging system from Swissphone for alerting crews. Alongside the improvement in speed, the combination delivers reliable coverage of this largely rural area at far lower cost than an all-P25 system.