Client Story: Oklahoma Department of Public Safety

Oklahoma’s state troopers often work in remote areas, out there alone in their vehicles, so staying connected is vital for safety and rapid incident response time. Tait dealer Stolz Telecom designed a cost-effective solution to plug coverage gaps, so troopers now have much more complete radio coverage across the state.

The Client: Oklahoma Department of Public Safety

Oklahoma DPS is a multi-service safety and law-enforcement organization, with approximately 1,500 civilian and uniformed employees across the state, including Oklahoma Highway Patrol. Highway troopers are responsible for patrolling the state’s 111,994 miles of city, county and state-maintained roads and highways. Field troopers are first responders to emergency situations from traffic collisions to natural disasters and civil disorders.

Due to the aging VHF Low-Band System, Oklahoma DPS was having issues with a lack of coverage across a third of the state. To solve this problem, DPS was interested to know how they could provide more complete radio coverage to their state troopers so they could stay in contact with dispatch and each other statewide.

Stolz Telecom Provides DPS with Cost-Effective Tait Solution

Oklahoma’s Department of Public Safety chose an in-fill Tait-based coverage solution proposed by Stolz Telecom, which promised to be faster to design and install, and markedly less expensive than solutions presented by other vendors.

“Tait wins hands-down on design, system, flexibility and cost.”

– Robert Stolz, President of Stolz Telecom

Another potential vendor had recommended augmenting the existing state-wide 800MHz trunked system with VHF trunking sites. Stolz President Robert Stolz says while that would fix the coverage issue, it would also require changing each of the 25,000 terminals that utilize the trunking system to expensive dual-band models.

“We were able to get a meeting with them and suggested they look at a P25 700MHz Voted Multicast solution,” Mr Stolz says. “We sent through an Oregon study from 2008, done when that state was trying to decide between VHF and 700 MHz. It was a very thorough investigation, using test equipment across a wide area and doing substantial coverage testing. It found that 700MHz covers just as well as VHF.”

“As a result, DPS gave us access to their sites to design a coverage plan for consideration. In the end we presented a solution which we believed would solve the issue, involving 35 sites and covering a third of Oklahoma, approximately 210,000 square miles.”

Statewide Coverage at a Fraction of the Cost

“The cost of our investigation and design work, supplying and configuring the radio network equipment and training came down to a fraction of the cost of alternative solutions recommended by other providers,” Mr Stolz says. The DPS Communications & Electronics Services Team took time to independently verify Stolz Telecom’s coverage calculations and assumptions to better understand why the Tait-based solution could be so much less expensive.

“We won this work because of Tait Communications. I can confidently say that nobody else can do what Tait can do because of how their base stations are engineered. Tait is the only manufacturer that allows you to do this without needing external voters. To do this with equipment from any other vendor, you would need voters plus expensive engineering services. It would be quadruple the price” 

– Robert Stolz, President of Stolz Telecom

The Most Flexible Base Stations on the Market

“Tait wins hands-down on design, system, flexibility and cost. With Tait, in terms of voting and multi-casting, everything is done in the base station. This 35-site project really shows that Tait can support large networks,” Mr Stolz says.

Another benefit are the remote access and spectrum analyzer capabilities of the TB9400 Base Station, allowing Field Technicians to remotely diagnose issues in real-time. This saves hours in driving to remote locations that are sometimes 5 hours away.

“For anyone looking at an augmentation of a wide network or anyone with an older analog network who is looking to move to APCO P25 and wants to have a multicast, or even a simulcast network, Tait Communications is a great cost-effective answer.”

– Robert Stolz, President of Stolz Telecom

Read our full Oklahoma Department of Public Safety client story.


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