Botetourt County, Virginia, USA

The Customer

Local authorities in Botetourt County, Virginia now have improved radio coverage with their new Tait Quasi-Sync System.

The Challenge

Botetourt County is an outdoor paradise - with the 4,000 ft Blue Ridge Mountains in the east and national forests making up 22 per cent of the County. But the same environment that attracts people to the area makes it a demanding place to provide radio communications. There are many
hills and valleys and in winter the region experiences extreme weather conditions including rain, snow, heavy ice and lightning.

Botetourt County was using a low band conventional system. However, the rugged landscape meant that upgrading a conventional system or moving to a trunked system would require many sites to get the coverage required and it would be costly to install. So, the option of a Quasi-Sync system was introduced.

The Solution

The four-site seven-channel system is used by three main agencies in the county, including the sheriff's department, fi re and rescue ambulance and the school district, which has radios in its 90 buses.

Quasi-Sync is a shared medium so it is important that the groups don't overlap. Each group has its own channel to ensure privacy and channel space. At the same time there is one channel common to all radios on the system so that the groups can co-ordinate in an emergency.

TaitNet QS2's very high simulcast performance signifi cantly reduces maintenance. It uses high stability oscillators to maintain a very stable transmitter frequency. With traditional simulcast systems transmitter frequencies drift over time so regular maintenance is required at each site to avoid distorted audio signals in areas where coverage overlaps.

With TaitNet QS digital signal processing based Line Equaliser Modules, routing audio to each transmitter, analyse the characteristics of a neighbouring transmitter and automatically adapt their own signals to match.