First Choice, Icom and Etherstack win P25 contract

First Choice Communications, in partnership with Icom America, has been awarded a UHF P25 trunked solution for the City of Roanoke Texas Police Department. The department is located in southern Denton County, where it is a member of the Regional SWAT Team and a support agency to the Texas Motor Speedway.

First Choice will implement Icom America’s infrastructure while leveraging Icom’s partnership with Etherstack to provide the P25 trunking switch. Icom’s FR9010 repeaters will be used as the backbone to power the system.

The P25 radio network will include open interfaces that conform to the ISSI and CSSI standards, which will enable the department to connect to other regional P25 radio networks to ensure interoperability with other agencies.

First Choice used a multivendor approach to meet the needs of the police officers and fire department subscriber units. The Roanoke Police Department chose Tait Communications’ TM9455 UHF mobile trunked radio with Phase II capability for its squad cars. The fire department will use Tait TM9455 UHF trunked dual-head remote mount mobiles for its city network and chose Tait TM9455 700/800 MHz dual remote head mount mobiles, enabling mutual aid response for surrounding agencies.

The fire department will use its previously purchased Motorola APX 7000 UHF/700/800 MHz portables to talk on the Icom/Etherstack Network, while using the 700/800 MHz bands for mutual aid on the surrounding networks.

For the police department, Harris XL200P multiband portables were chosen. The XL200P is a software-defined radio with VHF conventional, UHF 1 and 2 trunked/conventional and 700/800 MHz trunked bands, enabling the department to interoperate at the user level with multiple agencies in the greater Dallas, Fort Worth and Denton County Metroplex.

First Choice is providing Avtec Scout VoIP consoles for the CSSI connectivity to the system through fibre-optic cabling being installed from the tower site to the police station, with a GE Microwave solution for backup.

Tait TM9455 700/800 MHz control stations integrated with the Avtec Outposts provide the connectivity to the surrounding agencies’ systems, while UHF TM9455s provide backup control stations in case the fibre is disabled and the microwave fails.

Staging of the system in the First Choice facility is taking place now and the network is on schedule for the July 2016 implementation and customer acceptance timeline.