Mathews supervisors voted unanimously to authorize county administrator Ramona Wilson to seek a consultant to come up with solutions to a coverage problem with the emergency radio network used by rescue, fire, police and other first responders. The board approved the measure during a special meeting held last Thursday following a presentation from Bob Brown of the Mathews Volunteer Rescue Squad, who spoke on behalf of the county’s first responders and 911 call center.The new 911 radio system, that started in 2018 and was fully implemented this past fall, is “running as it is contractually supposed to be,” he said. The system is reliable with a professional grade of equipment, more rugged individual radios and “far superior” voice quality. However, when it was designed, it was for a standard of outdoor coverage, not indoor. A revised analysis that contractor L3Harris performed, he said, showed that Mathews is somewhere about 66-70 percent “highly reliable” coverage in buildings—resident...