The long awaited, much anticipated start of construction of the new radio system infrastructure has commenced. During the week of June 30 contractors from ANS began construction on the new towers at Providence and Milton.

The tower at Providence will be 225’ in height and the tower in Milton will be 175’. The foundations will be dug and reinforcing rod (re-bar) will be installed and concrete poured. The attached picture shows workers assembling the re-bar for the “pad” of the tower foundation. Approximately 28,000 lbs of re-bar was used in the Providence tower. On Thursday July 3^rd approximately 100 cubic yards of 5,000 lbs mix concrete was poured at Providence. The pad size you see in the picture is approximately 32’ square. The concrete must have a “cure time” before steel can be erected on it. We anticipate that cure time to be 7-10 days. The tower steel has been shipped from Iowa and should be arriving this week.

Foundations for the shelters will also be finished in the coming weeks and the shelters used for housing our radio equipment will be arriving shortly there after for setting.

Stand-by generators have been ordered and will be arriving soon for Milton, Providence, Halfmoon and McGregor.

We will post photos of the construction as it progresses so all can see our progress.

An administrative decision has been made that we will need to issue a request for proposal (RFP) as opposed to simply buying off the NYS contract. The county has issued a request for information to radio vendors to allow them to respond to our proposed network design. Responses are due back July 15^th.

We have suffered a small set back with our efforts to use the FAA tower at Stillwater. A structural evaluation indicates the tower is over stressed at the current time without our proposed tower load. We are working with the FAA and their structural engineer to see if there is a way to salvage the use of this tower.

Work will be starting soon on the installation of the new county microwave system. We selected Alcatel-Lucent to be our vendor. The new system has been shipped and we have received it. The new dishes and equipment will be installed as soon as we can get on the towers and the shelters are set. The first phase of the microwave system will be Spruce Mt., Providence, Milton and Halfmoon.