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Why don't they add in an analogue television signal?

BTM

The capabilities described seem to be no greater than (modified) ham radio gear. I simply don't see what all the fuss is about. Commercial products are __far__ cheaper and far easier to assess the bugs, including "birdies". (If you've ever used a spectrum analyser you why there called birdies. :)

Why don't they ask the group who has been using multiband equipment for several decades. Amateur Radio operators. They have radios that operate from below 1 MHz to over 1GHz. They have been doing (without pay) emergency radio communications for a very long time now.

The Department of Homeland Security only gives the kiss of death to public works projects. Here's what's going to happen; A bunch of committees will be called, and they're going to make a whole bunch of suggestions about what it "should" do. Each organization will want to have at least one feature included, a vote, etc. Tens (possibly hundreds) of millions will be lost doing this. It'll be filed under "R&D costs". At least a third of those suggestions will be crap or impossible/unfeasible to implement. It'll be recycled a few times on the General Schedule before some hapless corporation wins the contract. Then all hell breaks loose as delays in the project force reductions in scope, and the process of defining "core features" begins. By this point, everyone will be pointing fingers, and it'll be half-implemented and broken in many places. The project's surviving assets will be quietly transferred after a GAO inquiry regarding cost overruns and lack of deliverables -- just ahead of a congressional committee being called on the matter. Two years later, someone gets the idea that the US should have a multi-band radio project...

I only say this, because they've tried it with different scopes over [theregister.co.uk] and over [blogspot.com] and over [securitymanagement.com] and over [govtech.com] again. Their technology department is understaffed due to high turnover and leadership problems.

Fundamentally, these things never leave the pilot phase, or if they do, they face deployment problems because the requirements are so obtuse and ambitious that existing technology can't adapt. Even if it can, bureaucratic problems usually end a project before it sees wide-scale deployment due to reluctance to adopt new technology and failures in leadership -- namely, not communicating with people in the field before trying to put something there.

Yeah, good luck with that. If it succeeds, it'll be a portable radio that costs $10K. It'll have to license P25 and SmartNet from Motorola, a couple of protocols from EF Johnson, have MPT1324 (The only real open standard in commercial radio), it'll need wide and narrow band coverage of 150, 450, and 800Mhz.

Sure, it can all be done with a DSP based radio, but someone's gotta pay for the Intellectual Property to make them work.

As a fire officer, I work closely with several other nearby towns. We are all on different radio frequencies. There are strategies to work well that mitigate the potential issues:

1. For neighboring towns, we have each other's frequencies available on our own radios.

2. When operating more distantly, we use a state wide non-repeated frequency for larger incidents to cover the incident scene, while operations command will use their repeated systems to communicate out to dispatch or with other agencies.

Number two is very important -- span of control is optimally at "5" (meaning you shouldn't be trying to manage more than 5 direct reports). At anything above 7 you become very inefficient. When the number of people you're trying to work directly with grows above that number you should be subdividing that span of control and instead talking to a single representation of each sector or division. ** That means, not everyone on scene should be attempting to communicate back to a central point at all once.

The modern public safety sector is all trained (or being trained) on NIMS (National Incident Management System). As an officer, I'm required to hold three different certifications within that program. Firefighters, police, ems workers, town managers, and public service workers (the town guys who fix things and make your city work) are all part of the program. The purpose of NIMS is to define and common and understandable method of managing incidents from the smallest (where I may have incident command at a car accident with one or two responding units) but that also scale up as needed to the very largest (e.g. I arrive on scene to find the reported car accident was actually caused by a train derailing and landing on the car, spilling toxic material into a river which crosses state lines). NIMS defines common language, common command structures, and even common paperwork standards for doing things like leasing a bulldozer to build a dike or a bunch of outhouses to use at a work camp.

My point is that the radio technology is only one challenge, and one that can be solved by working together in a well coordinated manner. More important is building and practicing the strategies to manage incidents in a coordinated manner.

If you're in the public safety sector and haven't had NIMS training yet, you will. It is rapidly becoming a requirement for any organization receiving federal grants or other funding. If you've heard bad things about it, ignore them. NIMS is actually fairly simple and uses good common sense strategies (e.g. drop obscure 10 codes and speak in plain language) for most of what it does. It is based on an incredibly successful management strategy used by the teams that run the huge wildfire operations. Their system used something like 1/3 the number of back end support people for every front line person when compared with the military.

For our department, about 90% of what NIMS requires was already very similar to what we were already doing. Very little had to change.

"Radios were sent to -Canadian Interoperability Technology Interest Group (Ottawa, ON Canada)"

Dear god. What are we going to do when we go to war with those french speaking queen loving northerners?! They will even be able to listen in on the Department of Defense frequencies! They will know our every move!

I demand that only DEFECTIVE radios are sent to Canada.

For maximum effect, I recommend that the radios only receive communications in the form of a poor impression of a Canadian accent- notably every word should be "Ay?"

(This post was a joke)

The US Army and Navy had this problem...came to light during the Grenada invasion. If I remember correctly, a forward observer wound up calling in a naval artillery strike by phone via US operator because he couldn't reach the ship by radio. Might be apocryphal, but it rings true. That's when military radios became AN-PRC-77s, the AN standing for Army/Navy. Amazing it has taken the civilians another 25 years to even consider implementing this.

Then we got these new boxes that find the frequencies in use and let everyone talk on their native radios, except that they kind of don't work. Guys inside substantial (steel frame) buildings can't seem to talk to anyone. If the water hole is more than 1/2 a mile away, they're out of the loop too. And operations that you'd like to keep on their own frequencies like water supply or medical services get sucked into the network anyway. There's also the problem of too many people trying to talk on the radio at once and stepping all over each other. We do need a solution to this problem, but this isn't it.