Vicksburg and Warren County are facing a double whammy on radio communication for law enforcement officials. One can be fixed, and one never will.

What cannot be fixed is the hilly terrain that sometimes interferes with reception.

What can be addressed is computerized equipment that Motorola, which has a contract to maintain the system, says quickly is becoming obsolete.

Motorola notified the city last week that replacement parts might become unavailable soon and its engineers have found that base signals between radios and the area’s five towers are too weak in too many areas, causing “dropped” communication.

Meeting Monday in a courtroom at the Warren County Courthouse, city and county law enforcement officials were told by local information technology experts the best bet might be for the existing equipment to be altered to become compatible with state radio frequencies.

Bill Ford, the city’s IT specialist, said the signals among about 700 radios used by city and county officials became weaker than usual in mid-September. The blame could be the equipment or it could be interference because of the area’s juxtaposition to other states’ and counties’ radio system.

Motorola has notified the city that replacement parts soon might become unavailable.

The city and county have renewed maintenance contracts with Motorola since 2009 to re-band radios on the 800 megahertz trunking system to keep up with technical advances.

This month, Vicksburg renewed its half of an interlocal agreement to do so. Warren County last did so in May 2011. Despite the renewals, city officials called Monday’s meeting out of fear that issues with the radios could prompt lawsuits if emergency response is affected.

Ford said signals drop when below the Receive Signal Strength Indicator, a standard measurement of radio wave frequency.

“When it’s lower than the RSSI, the radio considers it an invalid signal,” Ford said.

“The problem seems to have been the RSSI was set too low,” he said. “We have to make it so the radios consider it a valid signal. We’ve had engineers working on it today. We should have engineers on the ground here no later than next Monday.”

Another challenge is that Warren County is geographically close enough to state agencies in Louisiana and Arkansas and to Rankin County, all of which have also re-banded on the same system, to cause frequencies to become unclear, Ford said.

“They assigned us frequencies that won’t work with our equipment,” he said.

A second issue is finding replacement parts for the overall communications system, said Ken Coleman, Warren County’s director of information technology.

“My recommendation is if there’s money out there to be obtained, go ahead and try to find those (funds) because Motorola is ending that part of the system,” Coleman said. “Even if you get (reception) back up to 98 percent, we’re still faced with it.”

In 2010, the city tapped an account set up eight years earlier with a portion of traffic ticket fines to finance 52 new radios that could operate on the Mississippi Statewide Wireless Integrated Network set up after Hurricane Katrina to improve communication between agencies during emergencies.

That system is a 700 megahertz trunk system managed by the Mississippi Wireless Communication Commission, made up of 16 state agency and organization heads. One advantage is that, currently, local governments aren’t charged to maintain the system.

Ford recommended the city and county be given “until around the first of the year” to test all the radios that work on the state system and work out kinks with the current ones.

“My opinion is, from an economic standpoint and viability standpoint, it seems the best way to go,” Ford said.

All five county supervisors and the Board of Mayor and Aldermen attended, as did Sheriff Martin Pace, Vicksburg Police Chief Walter Armstrong, Warren County Emergency Management Director John Elfer, E-911 director Jason Tatum and Warren County Fire Coordinator Jerry Briggs.