After two years of hard work and planning, the Marshall County 911 radio project is in the home stretch, and emergency service communications should be much more efficient once it is completed.

While the project itself is focused on upgrading and building radio transmission towers to meet new standards and cover more ground with less interference, Marshall County Sheriff Joel Phillips said several factors have necessitated the change, including the gradual transition from Very High Frequency (VHF) radios to Project 25 (P25) radios or digital radios, which started in 2012. With VHF radios, radio interference with transmissions was common, and there were areas where emergency responders couldn’t be reached.

“There would be times where we couldn’t hear dispatch. We couldn’t hear other responders, and even with the new system with our new radios that we currently have, there are those dead areas where we aren’t able to be reached and we aren’t able to transmit,” Phillips said.

While the Marshalltown Police and Fire departments updated their radios to the digital system, Phillips said volunteer fire departments and volunteer emergency first responders in other Marshall County communities were still using the VHF radio system. The mismatched radio systems added extra steps for the communications center as they had to convert and boost the digital signals out to the VHF radios in order to communicate with them.

This made communication between emergency personnel more difficult, and 10 years after the conversion started, VHF radio parts and equipment became harder to find. The volunteer fire departments and emergency first responders had to find used equipment just to maintain their radios.

“It’s just not supported. It’s the end of life for VHF radios. They’re doing what they can to hold it together,” Phillips said. “This was the next step in the process to get everyone on the same system, the P25 system.”

In order to streamline communication between emergency personnel and to minimize “dead areas,” the Marshall County Supervisors approved the radio project just about two years ago. Multiple groups including manufacturers, electricians, engineers and public safety organizations all collaborated on the project.

“We’ve got a lot of these entities together, and we’ve come up with this project working together to kind of come up with a solution,” Phillips said.

RACOM — the Marshalltown company responsible for designing and installing the new radio tower technology — made a map model of where radio towers would need to go to offer wider coverage. Building new towers, coupled with upgrading current towers to better support the P25 radios, would make communication not just more efficient within one organization but between all of them.

With a general idea of where the towers should go to make that change possible, the next step was locating the necessary property.

“Most of the time for this type of project, you try to find existing structures because building a tower is obviously really expensive,” Phillips said.

The largest dead area surrounded St. Anthony and Clemons, so they knew they needed a tower there. There were no tall structures available to build onto, however, meaning they would have to construct their own. Finding a suitable property proved difficult because the area they were looking at was surrounded by farmland.

While it did take a little bit of searching, they were able to locate a farmer in the area who was willing to lease an acre of property for the new tower to be built. It is currently under construction.

The St. Anthony/Clemons tower is the only one that was constructed from scratch for the project as the existing towers were modified for the new system, and the Le Grand water tower is being used to mount radio equipment, removing the need for a new structure there.

Marshall County 911 Director Rhonda Braudis is also looking forward to the benefits of the soon to be completed project as efficient communication is crucial to the call center’s basic operations.

“Going to the new system, there is better coverage,” Braudis said. “Your 911 dispatchers are your first first responders. They are the first point of contact for the responders in the field and those calling in for assistance needing help from those responders. So it is vital for our dispatchers to be able to have that immediate contact with those responders.”

Braudis said supporting the people who need help will be easier with the new system as well because dispatchers will be able to type the information into the system and the system will send out the dispatch.

“It’s a benefit to the citizens of Marshall County because they’re not having to lose the attention of that dispatcher just to assign those units and get them started. The system will automatically do that, and then (the dispatcher) can go back and update it,” Braudis said.

While the dispatchers are still providing the information and sending a unit out, they won’t have to do it verbally, which will allow them to focus on the caller.

Assuming all goes well, the towers should be completely tested and operational by December.

“We’re very excited about it, and very hopeful,” Braudis said. “Technology changes every single day, and when you’re looking at that technology, you’ve got to make sure we’re always staying with what’s going to help Marshall County the most because we have to look out for our community.”

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Contact Susanna Meyer at 641-753-6611 or

smeyer@timesrepublican.com.