Putnam County says acceptance testing for new radio network will start next week; sheriff's radios could be live in October

Ralph Lipton of the Bureau of Emergency Services told the Putnam County Protective Services Committee on Sept. 12 that the county radio replacement project has reached a critical phase: vendor meetings are complete and acceptance testing with Motorola is scheduled to begin the following Monday.

"If all goes well at the meeting, we will literally start testing with Motorola, the acceptance test starting Monday," Lipton said, adding that the sheriff's department has been largely programmed and could be on the new network in October barring test issues.

Lipton described a testing window of roughly two weeks for acceptance tests followed by about a month to complete final programming and deployments for patrol units. Committee members responded positively; staff said the project team has been working closely with the sheriff's office and expects to return with implementation progress reports.

The committee did not vote on the radio project at this meeting; the presentation served as an operational update. Lipton said the project team's goal is to minimize service disruption during cutover and to complete acceptance testing before broader rollouts to other county users.

Next steps include completion of acceptance testing with the vendor, a short validation period and scheduling for additional departments to be brought online after the sheriff's office is confirmed stable on the new network.