Press Contact: Bryan Wilkins

The brand new 40,000 sq. ft. city hall and police station in the Seattle suburb of Sammamish, Wash. has a sq. ft. of space for each of the city’s 40,000 residents. It’s is a beautiful facility that compliments the local environment perfectly. That being said, the technologies used within the building needed to be equally complimentary to their architectural surroundings – the facility’s Telex Radio Dispatch equipment being a prime example of an appropriately seamless systems installation.

“We had the architectural challenge of how to integrate our various radio systems in one part of the building while running cabling to the roof without making any major architectural modifications,” says Pete Butkus, Deputy City Manager, City of Sammamish. “The RoIP idea came up and Telex was suggested as the most low-profile and user-friendly solution."

"Both our remote transmissions station and emergency operations center now operate over our in-house intranet wiring," Butkus continues, "running up via the network to the second floor, which happens to be next to the antenna farm on the roof. We avoided a major architectural redo to accommodate cabling and are very happy with the results.”

The Telex system, based around IP-223 IP network remote adapters and two C-soft stations, provides a fully customize-able VoIP/RoIP interface for the city’s volunteer Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), skilled operators who use primarily ham radios. Though a quiet city, the region’s geological profile means the CERT are of critical importance: “Sammamish is located on a plateau in a seismically active area,” Butkus adds. “Our concern is, when the big earthquake comes – especially if it comes during the winter when the ground is saturated with rain – we will lose all of our major transportation links on or off the plateau. That makes the old-fashioned ham radios that much more valuable to us as backup emergency communications. Combining this tried-and-true approach with the Telex technology provides us with the most reliable and flexible solution. ”