Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Radio Subscriber Issues topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
County and vendor troubleshoot aging XTL 5000 radios that won’t affiliate with trunking system
Summary
Red Tail and county staff discussed persistent affiliation failures with legacy XTL 5000 subscriber radios, outlined a troubleshooting plan using working code plugs from neighboring counties, and acknowledged some units may be at end of life and require replacement.
Daniels County staff and Red Tail Communications spent part of the April 2 meeting addressing repeated failures of some XTL 5000 subscriber radios to affiliate with the county’s trunking system.
Red Tail described steps to diagnose the problem: attempt importing a working code plug from a neighboring county’s XTL 5000 to a local base radio, then incrementally rebuild configurations to identify failing fields. The vendor said the XTL 5000s are old and may be beyond expected service life; while some customers still use them successfully, hardware faults or firmware incompatibilities with newer configurations may explain intermittent affiliation loss.
County participants asked whether the radios could be repaired or whether a replacement purchase would be inevitable. Red Tail said the approach will be to attempt the code-plug test first; if that fails, the county may need to evaluate phased replacement for radios that cannot be restored. No procurement decision was made at the meeting.
The vendor said subscriber-programming work requires coordinated access to every agency’s radios and recommended intentional scheduling with fire, EMS and other stakeholders to avoid multi-week, high-cost rollouts. The county agreed to discuss coordination and notify partner entities before any mass reprogramming.
Next steps: Red Tail to test code plugs and report back; county staff to coordinate schedules with partner agencies prior to any large-scale reprogramming or replacement effort.
