At left, Chandler Police Chief Ron Reeves stands with the department's new Chevrolet Tahoes. At right, Teletouch employees install a radio repeater atop the water tower at Winchester Park. CHANDLER - The city’s police department has upgraded its communications system after installing a radio repeater atop a water tower at Winchester Park.

"For years, we’ve had a lot of problems communicating with Henderson County dispatchers," Chief Ron Reeves said. "In certain areas on the east end, there are dead zones. Officer safety was an issue. Now, we can communicate outside our vehicles with dispatch."

A radio repeater receives and then transmits a weak or low-level signal so it can cover longer distances. Tom Rushing of Teletouch Communications Inc. said the upgrade, financed by a Homeland Security grant, improves officer safety and cooperation among publicsafety agencies.

Paul Bryant and CPD Photos The Chandler Police Department’s "portables are actually going to help the PD and the fire department put in two voter sites. It improves their safety because they are going to be able to talk to each other more reliably. In previous situations, we were in a house or on the side of the road, we couldn’t talk to dispatch. We’d have to walk back to our cars, which wasn’t always possible."

Rushing is the vice president of Teletouch’s two-way division and assistant chief for the Chandler Volunteer Fire Department.

"With the grant, we were also able to get digital radios and portable hand-helds," Reeves said. "We upgraded our radio equipment from analogue to digital."

Before the repeater was in- stalled on the water tower on FM 315 South, Chandler police could not communicate with dispatchers or other officials outside their patrol units.

Reeves said that issue, along with "dead zones" in the county, constantly posed a risk to police.

"We have held hand-held walkie-talkies since the beginning. They’ve only been useful to us communicating on private channels - car-tocar and officer-to-officer. We’ve had incidents in the past with major accidents, crime scenes, pursuits, and family violence.

"In a dead spot, we’d have no communication with Henderson County, and Henderson County would dispatch back-up when it couldn’t reach us on the radio. We’ve had to do the same thing for them."

Along with the radio upgrade, Chandler has added three new Chevrolet Tahoes to its patrol fleet to replace aging Ford Crown Victorias. The 2010 trucks were bought from Holiday Chevrolet in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for $114,00.