Whether or not the West Palm Beach (Fla.) public safety radio system works properly is open for debate, as evidenced by the large number of people on both sides who claim they are right. West Palm Beach council members are scheduled to hear both sides today during discussions to approve a $1.6 million purchase of 400 radios that would move public safety radio operations to the Palm Beach County system. The county’s Motorola system went live in 2001 and has been successfully supporting 68 agencies. Meanwhile the city and five other jurisdictions have been using a Harris OpenSky radio system since 2006 that is arguably the subject of poor coverage, glitches and unintelligible speech. A 2010 negative evaluation of the OpenSky radio system was never made public, critics point out. Now West Palm Beach is considering a move to the county’s radio network to improve operations. Read more about the debate here, and listen to a very remarkable logging tape clip of the OpenSky radio that demonstrates the quality of audio on the system.
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The Pam Beach County Public Safety Radio System is a Motorola brand system that has been in place since 2001 and is not Harris or Open Sky. The MPSCC, which is a consortium of less than a 1/2 dozen municipalities, contracted to build an OpenSky system just for themselves. To date 2 of the 6 are on the Open Sky system while the County supports 68 agencies that have connection’s to its County-Wide network.
I would appreciate the article being fixed as it is totally incorrect.
Thanks for the information and corrections. I have revised the story in response to your comment.
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