US Sets Up Emergency Multi-Band Radio Project 130
coondoggie writes "Looking to help eliminate the dangerous and inefficient hodgepodge of communication and network technology used by emergency response personnel, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today said it had picked 14 groups from across the country to pilot an ambitious Multi-Band Radio project.
In 2008, the DHS Science and Technology Directorate awarded a $6.2 million contract to Thales Communications to demonstrate the first-ever portable radio prototype that lets emergency responders — police, firefighters, emergency medical personnel and others — communicate with partner agencies, regardless of the radio band they operate on."
Smart Radio Challenge (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Waiste Money on what has allready been done (Score:5, Informative)
Because hams don't use APCO25 or many of the other digital public service protocols currently in use. They also can't encrypt their communications as many agencies have the need to do.
This is a software defined radio that can be programmed to work with any of them, and ostensibly, all of them. Including analog FM systems that hams use.
There are many amateurs who are using their own software defined radios, so in a way, I guess you're correct. But I doubt Motorola, GE or Ericsson are going to turn over information on their communications systems to the hams. But they will give it to Thales...for a price.
Re:What about trunked 800Mhz systems? (Score:3, Informative)
Because 800Mhz isn't practical everywhere.
Put an 800Mhz system in the Texas Hill Country...you'll end up with needing a repeater site on every other hilltop.
Put an 800Mhz system in where there's lots of pine trees. You'll discover that pine needles are about 1/4wave long at 800Mhz and make excellent attenuators.
Re:Waiste Money on what has allready been done (Score:1, Informative)
Oh yes they do...
http://www.florida-repeaters.org/apco25proof.pdf [florida-repeaters.org] for one example.
Interoperability doesn't have to be about radios. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
This is a big problem (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Check with amateur operators (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Waiste Money on what has allready been done (Score:1, Informative)
Who do you think developed modern communications technology? Amateurs have traditionally taken experimental concepts and technologies and methodologies and 'played' with them until they've become viable for general use. SSB, FM, VHF, UHF, microwave, TTY (wireless teletype, which became packet data communication... sound familiar? we're using an advanced version of that right now on our interwebnets). Packet plus terrestrial radio repeater networks equals cellular telephone. Oh and encryption and satellites and... okay enough examples. Anyway, my totally unrelated thought, $6 Million seems like a tiny amount of money to spend for R&D on an all-connecting emergency comms system. Not that I'm into wasting tax money, but hell, tens of Billions get wasted every year on who knows what with no real benefit to our country.
Re:Waste Money on what has allready been done (Score:3, Informative)
Part 97.113 says that "messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning, except as otherwise provided herein;" are prohibited. (Satellite control signals are one "otherwise" exception.) It doesn't say that "messages encrypted with a published key ..." are permitted, and encryption using a "published method" doesn't mean that the message can be decrypted. That's why it's encryption and not encoding. Blowfish is a published method. Blowfish without the key is obscured meaning.
The ones doing HSMM (High Speed Multi-Media, or 802.11b/g) publish the WEP key under the assumption that this is sufficient to avoid the prohibition. Clearly, the messages ARE being encoded to obscure their meaning, with the assumption that nobody but an FCC monitoring station would bother looking up the key and listening in. I don't think this has ever been tested with an official ruling. I don't think anyone really cares that much about such short range communications. In fact, ITU treaties now allow, and Austria (IIRC) has permitted, encryption on domestic traffic above 50MHz (typically short-range). The ARRL was going to ask for this here, but then backed down. I have yet to get an answer from anyone in ARRL staff why.
And this is one reason why morse code (CW) is often used with emergency communications.
No, sorry, CW is used because it can get through when voice or other modes can't, not because it obscures the meaning of anything.
Now, what IS used in emergency communications is FBB compression on packet radio systems (winlink 2000 systems, e.g.). THAT truly is "encoding" that everyone assumes is allowable because the protocol is published and thus not intended to obscure the meaning of the embedded message, even though many EMCOMM ops point to this "encoding" as security for the message. They want to have it both ways.
Re:This is a big problem (Score:3, Informative)
The problems solved by your airshow HAM are easily fixed by one of the ACU units [raytheon.com] from Raytheon JPS.
Just plug in radios for NYSP, local fire brigade, county sheriff, ambulance service, links back to one or more repeated channels with a real dispatcher (probably on a tac channel, or a P25 talkgroup), plus one that the local HAMs are legally allowed to use, and call it a day.
It's easy to bring the whole system up or down, or to add and remove individual radios, or to tie in other systems over telephone lines or cell phone or nextel or SIP, or whatever.
(This, of course, is assuming that some local dispatching agency doesn't already have the tech to accomplish this built into their console, which they likely do these days.)
(Disclaimer: We've sold a few ACU-1000 units, and a whole bunch of ACU-Ts. They work fine. Even the local SOs around here have them built into their emergency mobile communications rigs, along with enough radios to make them do useful work amongst a bunch of different trunking systems and frequencies.)
As a small-town volunteer firefighter... (Score:3, Informative)
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.