After about a year of sitting idle, the MARCS tower built on the east side of Route 7, south of Brookfield schools, became operational in December. The hang-up was a defective part, said Trumbull County Commissioner Rick Hernandez.
Local police and fire departments years ago urged county and/or state officials to do something about spotty radio coverage in some areas of the county, and they have eagerly awaited the improved radio communications the MARCS Tower was to give them.
“The MARCS tower is up and operational, and we’ve actually switched over,” said Brookfield Police Chief Aaron Kasiewicz in a Dec. 24 voicemail message. “They patched it in with our old frequency so we could still use both, but reception’s great, and it seems to be working fine.”
The Multi-Agency Radio Control System was built to serve Ohio agencies, but officials decided to allow local, county and federal agencies to use it. Ohio Highway Patrol was likely the first agency serving Trumbull County to use the radio communication system, and many local police and fire departments now use it. Brookfield Fire Department switched over to MARCS in 2020 but it found, as the highway patrol had already known, that there were areas on the eastern side of the township where MARCS could not reach, leaving first responders unable to communicate with each other or Trumbull County 911 unless they had a backup communication system. Other Trumbull departments, including in Hubbard and Fowler, that use MARCS also complained of “dead spots.”
In about 2022, Trumbull County commissioners and the state of Ohio decided to split the cost to put up a 400-foot MARCS radio tower in Brookfield – on county-owned land at the end of McMullen Drive – in hopes of eliminating dead spots. Construction began in 2024 and by the beginning of 2025 work was complete. The blinking light at the top of the tower required by the Federal Aviation Administration to warn aircraft of the tower’s presence showed that electricity was connected to the tower, but no radio communications were passed through the tower.
Hernandez said he invited a FirstEnergy representative to a meeting in March to try and find out why the tower was not working.
“At that meeting, the First Energy rep said that it would be up and running within one week,” Hernandez said in a Dec. 24 email.
Apparently, county officials assumed the problem was taken care of. But, in October, Brookfield and Hubbard officials complained that the tower still was not working, Hernandez said. County officials met with state MARCS officials and representatives from Motorola, the maker of the MARCS equipment; FirstEnergy; and OarNET, a state agency that provides a variety of technology services to state agencies, educational institutions and public broadcasters, Hernandez said.
“It did take them quite some time to run tests on the antenna on the tower and to have Motorola and OarNET collaborate,” Hernandez said. “After several tests, it was found that a ‘polyphaser’ was defective. I don’t know what a polyphaser is, but evidently this was the hang-up.”
A polyphaser protects electrical equipment from voltage spikes and surges, such as when lightning strikes.
Brookfield Police Department has had radios capable of using the MARCS signal for some time, but stuck with using its UHF/VHF frequencies until the MARCS tower was complete.
