After less than a year of construction, a new radio tower stands at one of the highest points in the county. With it comes more protection for first responders throughout the county.

Construction on the tower began last fall on State Road 135 North above the Bean Blossom overlook. The tower is being paid for with part of a $2 million capital improvement bond, which will be paid back with property taxes.

The total cost of the project was almost $1 million, commissioner Diana Biddle said last month.

The new tower helps fill holes in the county’s primary radio system caused by hills and valleys. Without the tower, in some areas of the county, officers were without cellphone service or radio coverage.

“There were places in the county the deputies didn’t hardly ever work because there was no communication,” Sheriff Scott Southerland said last week. “They wouldn’t work or patrol those roads or stop cars in these roads because there’s no way to talk to the dispatchers, and cell phones didn’t work there either in many of the bad spots.”

When deputies responded to a call in an area with no radio or cell phone coverage and dispatchers could not reach them to make sure they were OK, more deputies would be sent out to check on them.

“There was a place on Hoover Road we were called to frequently. … The first few times, everybody would panic and think something had happened to them, but that wasn’t the case. It was that they didn’t have any radio coverage,” Southerland said.

Now radios work almost everywhere thanks to the new tower. “Of those bad spots, 95 percent of them have been fixed,” Southerland said.

The new tower is helping volunteer fire departments communicate better, too.

Biddle said last month that there was some money left over in the $1 million project budget, so the county was also able to put up two VHF antennas for the volunteer fire departments for about $15,000.

“There are places that have never had a radio signal in Brown County before,” she said during the April 13 commissioners meeting. “Some firemen were down keying their mics because they had signal in Van Buren Township where they never had signal before. From a public safety standpoint, that is just a fabulous response to that tower situation.”

Some fire departments and the ambulance service still use an older VHF communication system, compared to the 800 mHz radio police use now. The two VHF repeaters replaced one older repeater for the fire departments at the old radio tower site at Brown County State Park. The equipment from that state park site was also moved to the new tower’s site.

“I’ve heard them testing it and what I’m hearing is that they have radio coverage in places where they did not have anything before. I know they sound a lot better,” Southerland said of the volunteer fire departments.

The volunteer fire departments are still operating on the VHF system still because they could not switch to the 800 mHz radio due to poor coverage in some areas. “Now that the poor coverage has been fixed, I expect them to be looking for grants through fire departments and through EMA to buy some additional 800 mHz radios so they can all go on the same system,” Southerland said.

The new building for the tower also has an uninterrupted power supply for communications and a backup generator for when the power goes out. “They had car batteries before. If the power went out, they would run on a car battery for awhile; then, they would go up to change the car batteries if there was an extended power outage,” Southerland said about the state park site.

“Now they (the radio equipment pieces) are in a nice, clean, dry, building that is heated and cooled with backup power.”

The new radio tower is next to land that was logged by order of Brown County Parks and Recreation last year, but the large cut in that valley was not related to the tower itself, Southerland said last week.

Initially, plans for the tower called for clearing a 100-foot by 100-foot area, which Southerland estimated would have been about 20 to 30 feet bigger than the fence enclosure there now.

Parks and rec had the nearby valley logged around the time the area was being cleared for the tower, resulting in confusion from community members on whether the two were connected. They were not, Southerland said.

“We were going to cut back 20 feet outside of the fence to try to keep trees from falling on the fence. That’s all we needed for the tower. In fact, my plan and my hopes were that building would be hidden in the forest up there and nobody would ever see it,” he said.

The county paid for the structure and the equipment, but Southerland said the tower will be maintained by the state since it runs on the state radio system.

“It should take care of communication needs for decades,” he said.