News Photo by Jordan Spence Presque Isle County Sheriff’s Deputy Renee Szymanski shows the new 911 radio system Thursday at the Presque Isle County Jail.

ROGERS CITY — The new Presque Isle County radio dispatch equipment has been installed and is much clearer and reliable than the previous system, Sheriff Bob Paschke said.

“It’s the state’s communication system. Basically what it is is there are antennas all over the state and they connect, there’s no breakage,” Paschke said. “If one breaks, something else covers it. So it’s basically their system, we’re just getting on that.”

The county not only upgraded radio consoles, it also updated the paging system.

“Before we were having problems where we had to use repeaters off the tower and they weren’t reaching out to different places. This here is a state of the art product,” he said.

Paschke said the different fire, police and emergency departments have liked the system and the capabilities.

“Even with the paging, it seems like when they’re outside the county they’re getting the pages. Before they weren’t even getting them when they were in the county. That seems to be working great,” he said.

The plans to move to this system started about a year ago, he said, and much of the work was spearheaded by County Clerk Anne Marie Main and Deputy Renee Szymanski.

Szymanski said the new system offers a lot more. One of the key components is the mapping system.

“It’s extremely important. We have 678 square miles and just to have a simple crossroad where that cell phone is pinging is so important,” she said.

One of the other features is the ability to share calls.

“If there’s an over abundance of calls, I can help answer. Or, I can silently monitor if (the other officer) on the call and I can hear something is going awry I can just pick up the phone at my desk,” Szymanski said.

This feature will be beneficial for training, she said. She said the transition has been smooth and the clarity unbelievable.

” For so many years we would have to say ‘Can you repeat your traffic,'” she said. “Do you know how old that gets? All you would get is static. I was in Lansing I was talking on our setup and they could hear me.”

Since the county’s dispatch protocol has changed a little bit at the south end it also can page Alpena if it needs more backup.

“Now we actually know where our firemen are going. We used to transfer a call straight to Alpena. We didn’t know the outcome unless it was something an officer went on. We had no way of knowing what took place. We couldn’t page our own people,” she said.

These issues are what spurred the project to move forward.

“We were really in a bad situation to get the right information out to the right people. We weren’t able to hear them respond. What started it there have been issues for many years,” she said.

Between residents, deputies and all other emergency workers officials decided to move forward. Now what they have to focus on is renovations of the dispatch room and removing old equipment, Paschke said.

“Right now we’re getting the dispatch room cleaned up, remodeled a little bit. Right now we’ve got wires in there since ’74. We’re going to start pulling that and clean it and then getting rid of the old equipment,” he said.

Jordan Spence can be reached via email at jspence@thealpenanews.com or by phone at 358-5687.