The Murray County 911 Center in Sulphur, Okla. recently upgraded their dispatch capabilities with the help of IP-223 RoIP remote adapters and state-of-the-art C-Soft IP-based software.



The 911 center, Murray County’s sole dispatcher, had been operating with a simple telephone and radio system for years. As the communications epicenter for Murray County, the 911 Center needed a system that offered the flexibility to serve a lengthy list of city police and fire departments. Roy Roundtree with the Murray County 911 Center comments:



“We dispatch for several different agencies: the Murray County Sheriff’s Office, the Sulphur Police and Fire Departments, Davis Police Department and Fire Departments, and seven rural fire departments as well. We also receive communications from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, the Oklahoma Game Warden, and we also handle traffic from what’s called the Light Horse – a law enforcement agency of the Chickasaw Indian Nation. In addition to that, our center also handles communications for the National Park Service and their facility here.”



Roundtree and his team invited Radio Shop Communications Service from Seminole, Okla. to come to Sulphur to demonstrate several different dispatch systems.



“I contacted Radio Shop and Sean Melia, our Telex sales rep, and he also made a special trip out here to let us see what choices we had,” says Roundtree. “He put the IP-223s and C-Soft through their paces along with a few other systems, and I was pleased with what I saw the Telex equipment could do. The first thing we always look at in every piece of hardware and software we install at the center is the GUI – it needs to be immediately easy to understand and use. We wanted something that was intuitive, user-friendly, point-and-click, so there was very little to remember in a tight, stressful situation. Our team needs to focus upon the task at hand, rather than navigating hardware. We were also able to configure each console’s graphic interface to our needs and specifications, so we could really build it to fit our requirements.”



After an impressive showing at Radio Shop’s demo, Murray County chose to install IP-223 adapters and C-Soft consoles at their 911 center.



“We’re running five IP-223s and everything is displayed on the monitor at C-Soft consoles,” says Roundtree. “We have three console positions and we normally operate two positions 24-7. Usually we only open up the third position on holiday weekends, when large amounts of tourists head for our area. The population of Murray County is only about 12,600, but the city of Davis also operates Turner Falls Park, and on a busy holiday weekend Turner Falls might drive in six to ten thousand visitors. The Chickasaw National Recreation Area also brings about one million visitors a year. So, on any given weekend, our county’s population might balloon from 12,600 to 50,000. We’re very different from many Oklahoma counties in that respect, and now we have a dispatch system to precisely meet our needs.”