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It’s the end of an era for emergency communications using analog radio on Martha’s Vineyard when the Dukes County Sheriff’s Office digitizes the airwaves Thursday.
The move will make first responder communication clearer and more stable, but a side effect will be the silencing of traditional scanners that many Islanders use to follow fire, police, and EMS activity.
The cost of reconnecting with those transmissions will require an investment of about $400 to $600 in a digital scanner, according to Dukes County Sheriff’s Deputy Anthony Gould, one of the architects of the modernization project. Deputy Gould said he also hopes to channel certain major emergency response communications, fires and crashes for example, into a traditional scanner frequency — 154.1225 — but that’s still a work in progress…
