Rayfield Communications comes full circle

Since building a 300-foot communications tower and moving in October 2000 to a new location at 2018 W. Woodland, Rayfield Communications has come full-circle, refocusing its efforts on the two-way radio systems it provides to businesses and public safety entities.

To that end, Rayfield Communications, which employs seven, no longer offers mobile telephone and paging services. Also, the company is now a Motorola dealer for sales and service.

"We put in a new communications system for businesses, a two-way radio system that ... combines the latest in analog technology with some of the latest in digital technology," said John Rayfield Jr., president of the company. "It provides more coverage."

Rayfield Communications also is scaling back its research and development work on software, Rayfield said.

"We're working with another company that will continue to carry the products we've developed, but we aren't going to be directly involved in those, so we can concentrate on the two-way radio," he said.

Rayfield said the company branched out into the mobile and paging services, and the software development, following the old adage about having too many eggs in one basket. But he added that "you can have too many baskets."

"If you diversify too much, you spread yourself too thin, and that's part of it. We felt maybe we were starting to spread ourselves too thin," he said. "Especially since becoming a Motorola dealer, we didn't want to do that."

Motorola affords the company plenty of new opportunities, said John Rayfield Sr., the company's vice president, so pursuing other ventures wasn't necessary.

"Any business has a certain amount of resources; i.e., people and funds, and trying to spread that thin and doing too many different things, you can hurt yourself," added the younger Rayfield.

Rayfield Sr. noted too that the company's still diversified in terms of its customer base, which includes several different types of businesses and the public safety entities.

"If there is a downturn in the economy, it usually will affect some businesses more than others, some of our customers more than others. So we have a wide variety of businesses, plus public safety (entities), plus the tower, so we still have the diversity there that's kind of built in," he said.

Although the company has returned to its roots, so to speak, Rayfield Jr. said the company's other ventures were important.

"It's been useful, all of what we learned doing the other (things), because all of the two-way radios are ... programmed with computers. The new communications system that we've built out is heavily computer-related ... so it's helped a lot in being able to run a better service on (our) equipment systems," he said.

Rayfield said the tower was built with the intent to lease space on it to other companies. But that hasn't yet worked out according to plan. To date, Nextel is the only paying tenant on the tower, Rayfield said, adding that that may soon change.

"Right now there's a paging company considering going up on the tower and there's a low-power FM broadcast station ... if we can physically figure out where to put them up there," Rayfield said.

"We're even with just what we've got on there, and (the tower)'s still a good investment for us it's an excellent investment for us, even with no other loading on the tower ... it's allowing us to do things with this new communications system that we could not have done without this tower," Rayfield said.

The tower was built to hold 60 antennas, and can accommodate four cellular or PCS providers. For its two-way radio systems, Rayfield Communications uses three antennas at present, and will soon add a fourth. Rayfield said the number of antennas used varies by the carrier, because paging companies don't use as many as PCS or cellular carriers do.

The tower also will be used by the National Weather Service and the Skywarn network of ham radio operators, he said.