Mirror photo by Gary M. Baranec Gerry Gamber, dispatcher, and Crystal Socoski, leader dispatcher at Altoona’s 911 center, work with the new radio system.

For most drivers, it’s a foreboding sound as you wait with a rolled-down window: A muffled dispatcher relays license information through the radio on a police officer’s belt.

They look simple enough to most civilians. But emergency radio systems are a matter of life and death, and they’re increasingly complex — often costing governments tens of millions of dollars to install and maintain.

Pennsylvania is well on its way to a new system, replacing a failure-plagued system that has run up some $800 million in bills. But lawmakers in Harrisburg remain cautious, even as a new, cheaper network is rolled out in several counties.

“When people are talking about spending money and they’re telling me it’s going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, it makes me very nervous for the taxpayers,” state Sen. Daniel Laughlin, R-Erie, told a state police official during a Wednesday committee meeting in Harrisburg. “So I would say this to you: If we’re going to sign up for this exorbitantly expensive radio system, there should be something in that contract that says we’re going to get every penny back if it doesn’t work.”

Those concerns are at least partly justified, according to experts.

Twenty-two state agencies including the state police rely on the Pennsylvania Statewide Radio Network, or Starnet, which provides communications over every county. For a decade, the state operated on VHF, the analog designation that once carried crackling TV signals to viewers’ homes.

In 2006, the state police began the final transition to a new system called OpenSky. OpenSky is digital, meaning far more information can be relayed — including, for example, the license and registration data that appears on state police cars’ onboard computers.

It was the height of technology, but its shortcomings quickly became apparent. OpenSky operates at 800 hertz (cycles per second), a frequency too high to effectively cover some rural and mountainous areas.

“It kind of fell short; at the time the technology wasn’t exactly figured out,” said Jeff Macalarney, owner of ComPros Inc. in Altoona. “They kind of jumped the gun early.”

Cost overruns continued, and the system’s failures became a topic of discussion in Harrisburg. Amateur radio enthusiasts on online forums took to calling the network “BrokenSky.”

As of this year, the statewide network has cost some $800 million and counting. State police troopers still carry old-style VHF radios as backups to their OpenSky systems, lawmakers noted this week.

While digital networks carry clear benefits, they can’t transmit partial information like old-style radios, Bedford County Emergency Management Director Dave Cubbison said. In the 1990s, a police officer working in a mountainous area could hear choppy messages, at least enough to get the gist; with a digital network, that message might come through either clearly or not at all.

“Those things are engineered in Harrisburg by these companies. … They’re all done in a sense that will work where the larger populations are,” Cubbison said. “The larger populations — Philly, Harrisburg — are all on flat plains. For a county in the mountains, it isn’t exactly a practical system.”

Even as state officials maintained more than 250 towers and hundreds more “microcells,” they began the transition to a new, hopefully more effective, system. Called P25, this new network is said to be more advanced, with the ability to hook directly into county-level networks.

That would be a major change from the existing system — in Blair County, for example — where state police have to ask to be connected with local counterparts using different systems during emergencies.

“It’s almost like when you had a telephone operator and you’d call in and say, ‘I need to be connected to so-and-so,'” Macalarney said.

By contrast, the P25 platform would allow state police to connect universally and immediately to whatever channel they need. To a civilian, the distinction is like that between an old party-line telephone and a sleek, digital cellphone.

It helps that many counties have already transitioned to P25, at least for some services. Blair, Bedford and Centre counties already use it for their own emergency responders and Huntingdon County is transitioning, Macalarney said.

State police have been open about their desire for an upgrade. At the hearing Wednesday, Maj. Diane M. Stackhouse, director of the police Bureau of Communications and Information Services, described P25 as the future of communications.

“Safety of life and property can only be ensured when public safety agencies can easily communicate with one another,” she said in a prepared statement. That’s particularly clear during natural disasters, citywide unrest and complex manhunts, Stackhouse said.

In October, state officials sealed a $44.5 million contract with Chicago-based Motorola Solutions Inc. to convert the state to P25. The company rolled out its first pilot in April in Warren County, with expansion planned soon in several more northwestern counties.

From there — assuming the system works as planned — P25 will gradually move eastward, police said. A state police document says all Pennsylvania should be covered by 2021.

State senators expressed cautious optimism for the new network. But with decades of expensive mistakes to look back on, they were open about their fears.

“For nine years I’ve heard: ‘The solution is just around the corner. All we have to do is spend a little bit more money and we’ll get there,'” Sen. Gene Yaw, R-Lycoming, told Stackhouse on Wednesday. “I hope you’re right this time.”

Mirror Staff Writer Ryan Brown is at 946-7457.