Penobscot County hurries to replace aging transmitter

BANGOR – Penobscot County officials were scrambling Tuesday to avoid losing a transmitter used by volunteer fire departments and ambulances, although a temporary fix made the same day provided some breathing room.

“Due to the age of it, it’s likely to fail sometime soon,” Chip Briggs, interim director of the Penobscot Regional Communications Center, said after Tuesday’s meeting with the Penobscot County commissioners.

The transmitter on the roof of the Penobscot County sheriff’s office is about 20 years old and is “on its way out,” said Briggs, who oversees a communications center that dispatches emergency services for nearly all of Penobscot County.

The transmitter is used to page out volunteer fire departments such as those found in Hermon and Levant, although communities with full-time fire departments such as Brewer and Old Town use different frequencies. In recent days the failings of the system became more apparent with a sharp increase in the bleed-over of some frequencies, county officials said.

The bleed-over interfered with or even blocked altogether some transmissions from deputies on patrol and interfered with other frequencies. Brewer Fire Chief Rick Bronson said Brewer’s frequency was getting some bleed-over from Dexter, although it wasn’t strong enough to block out the Brewer transmissions.

County officials feared that the transmitter would fail altogether, leaving the county to rely on a mobile emergency communications system for coverage.

But representatives of Whitten’s 2-Way Service – the company that maintains the county’s communications equipment – recommended Tuesday that a backup transmitter could be reprogrammed and used in the case of a total malfunction.

“We really won’t be off the air for very long, if at all,” Briggs predicted.

The county already had proposed a fix by adding a “combiner” that would reduce the number of antennas needed, thereby curbing any bleed-over between the antennas.

In response, county officials will waive normal bidding procedures in an effort to speed up a permanent replacement. But Penobscot County Administrator Bill Collins acknowledged Tuesday that it’s not clear when a replacement will be put in place or how much it will cost. The county is looking to use federal Homeland Security funds to pay for the fix.

Meanwhile, Whitten’s patched up the existing antennas, cleaning some parts and adjusting the tuning so that the frequencies are now working properly.