Boston, MA - Radio network police used during Marathon attacks in limbo

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Thunderbolt

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jim202

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The Boston radio system is no stand alone in the UHF T-band mess that has been created. There are a number of systems around the country that are in the same limbo status. Between the screw up that Congress has created from poor input and the inaction of the FCC to suggest a new frequency to go to, many agencies are left holding the bag. The best solution at this point is for Congress to un do what it has done in the mandate to clear the UHF T-band for commercial carrier's use.

So far there seems to be nothing in the back room chattering to indicate a solution to probably the biggest blunder this country has made for radio communications yet. The next chapter of the on going soap opera has yet to be wrote. Seems Congress just keeps piling up the crap it has created on their plate of things to do. Congress should start to consider their future and the well being of the country. They are the ones that have managed to put our country in a position of financial disaster. The House speaker and others just seem to be tap dancing for a better political position rather than solving any of the problems. They forget that this can start to be resolved with up coming elections.
 

rapidcharger

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Seems Congress just keeps piling up the crap it has created on their plate of things to do. Congress should start to consider their future and the well being of the country. They are the ones that have managed to put our country in a position of financial disaster. The House speaker and others just seem to be tap dancing for a better political position rather than solving any of the problems. They forget that this can start to be resolved with up coming elections.

The problem is congress doesn't have to answer to their constituents. Congress has to answer to their paymasters who in fact, got them elected through financial contributions and media spin. And their paymasters don't want BAPERN to exist in the T-BAND. Heck, they don't want BAPERN to exist at all. This could be resolved through elections if there were some serious reforms made to how elections are funded. Someone is going to come along and warn us to keep it on topic so that's all I've got to say.
 

mancow

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The law requires public safety agencies with radios that broadcast on frequencies of 470-512 MHz to move to new airwaves within 11 years. The government plans to auction that spectrum to help pay for the tax cut and jobless benefits, as well as the eventual creation of a nationwide, high-speed data and voice communication network for first responders.

Read more: Federal radio mandate could cost public safety agencies millions - Brookline, Massachusetts - Brookline TAB
Follow us: @BrooklineTAB on Twitter | brookline.tab on Facebook
 

MTS2000des

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BAPERN, NYPD/FDNY, and Los Angeles are just the tip of the iceberg of those who will get boned in the latest SCAM PLAN perpetrated by Congress, Radio Spectrum Sales and Leasing LLC (aka the Federal Communications Commission) and APCO. Notice I included APCO, because they are woefully silent on this situation- but when you FOLLOW THE MONEY and see who their largest financial contributors are, it's easy to see why their "squelch control" is set to maximum.

The public in this country has NO CLUE what an impact, both financially and logistically, this outright FRAUD the T-band takeback being perpetrated by these sleaze buckets at the telecom cartels and their playthings in DC is.

The idea of creating some nationwide public safety network is ludicrous. It will be another example of the RACE TO WASTE of taxpayer money, and nothing will get accomplished but further increasing the national debt and making a few vendor's stockholder's happy.

The sad part is, BAPERN is one of the most robust and reliable voice radio networks in the country. It is what most people who actually work on an ambulance, or walk a beat, or go into a burning building NEED and WANT: simple, AFFORDABLE voice communications without fail. Nevermind it is close to four decades old, it works, and works well.

But at the end of the day, the cartels don't get a dime anytime a Boston cop keys up his portable- and these greedy pigs are working overtime to change this. Think it's not going to happen? Ask Sprint how their master SCAM PLAN netted them some nice juicy block of contiguous and VALUABLE 800MHz ESMR spectrum.
 

SCPD

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Just another few trillion of your hard earned tax money to come... Nothing to see move along.... They should have not required the initial narrowband mandate that has broken many agencies pockets if they knew this decision was to come. Brilliant minds at work. I believe they also want to eventually bump everyone in public safety off VHF to go to the 700. I recall reading it somewhere just not sure where.
 

rankin39

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Cities should just ignore the deadline and keep transmitting in the segment. Then, when the FCC and/or Congress tries to force the issue, there'll be a big publicity explosion on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc. and things will get straightened out in some intelligible manner. You have to rub the politicians' noses in their own messes VERY publicly and with lots of negative publicity before they will get the message. When they tell Bostonians they can't have their police and fire radios any more, something will give quickly.
Bob, w0nxn
 

MTS2000des

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Cities should just ignore the deadline and keep transmitting in the segment. Then, when the FCC and/or Congress tries to force the issue, there'll be a big publicity explosion on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc. and things will get straightened out in some intelligible manner. You have to rub the politicians' noses in their own messes VERY publicly and with lots of negative publicity before they will get the message. When they tell Bostonians they can't have their police and fire radios any more, something will give quickly.
Bob, w0nxn

You're thinking that today's politicians (at the local level) are rubbing Androgel all over themselves and have the fortitude to do something like this. In the real world, it will go down like the 800MHz rebanding sham that was pulled upon us. Billions will be spent, most of it from Federal tax dollars, landing in the hands of a few vendors- to move all of these people either to some worthless, bloated 700MHz crap that doesn't work, and it will be another decade before all the dust settles before people say:

Wow, what just happened? How come my new portable sounds like a cat in a blender? Wait a minute, the Telecom Cartels will be there to save the day, with some absurd plan to take over public safety communications, and we will have what is in place in the UK. A private/public consortium of non-sense that will serve no other purpose than to increase the ARPU of the cartels and improve their sales of cellphone devices that have a meter running everytime an "app" is run and a virtual microphone is keyed, a message sent, as every KB of data comes stream in/out of these new "public safety enterprise grade handsets", your tax rates, millage rates keep going up..up...up to keep up in..

THE RACE TO WASTE

So while they're may be some delay, Congress critters have declared THIS SHALL BE and it's as Nextel used to say....DONE.

Enjoy cost effective, flexible, and scalable LMR voice radio for mission critical while you can, the pigs at the cartels are in overdrive to reclaim the spectrum, and that market.

and we will ALL be paying for it.

"rethink possible"
 

KC2zZe

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Wow, a lot of heat surrounding this topic.

I'd like to throw in my two pennies...

The Boston radio system is no stand alone in the UHF T-band mess that has been created. There are a number of systems around the country that are in the same limbo status. Between the screw up that Congress has created from poor input and the inaction of the FCC to suggest a new frequency to go to, many agencies are left holding the bag. The best solution at this point is for Congress to un do what it has done in the mandate to clear the UHF T-band for commercial carrier's use.
I'd go one step further and propose that the T-Band (where possible, in light of any UHF television stations that may still be on the air) frequencies be made available nationwide - not just in the ten major metropolitain area that it can be used in and around.

The public in this country has NO CLUE what an impact, both financially and logistically, this outright FRAUD the T-band takeback being perpetrated by these sleaze buckets at the telecom cartels and their playthings in DC is.
And, unfortunetly, I think many in public safety don't either.


The sad part is, BAPERN is one of the most robust and reliable voice radio networks in the country. It is what most people who actually work on an ambulance, or walk a beat, or go into a burning building NEED and WANT: simple, AFFORDABLE voice communications without fail. Nevermind it is close to four decades old, it works, and works well.

But at the end of the day, the cartels don't get a dime anytime a Boston cop keys up his portable- and these greedy pigs are working overtime to change this. Think it's not going to happen? Ask Sprint how their master SCAM PLAN netted them some nice juicy block of contiguous and VALUABLE 800MHz ESMR spectrum.
While I agree with the overall sentiment expressed in the first paragraph, I must beg to differ with your anamosity toward the 800 MHz rebanding process. As a regular user of the 800 MHz spectrum (the EDACS variety, with some conventional thrown in once in a rare while), the old interleaved mess that was the 800 MHz band plan was a dangerous disaster. Sprint (and others) getting a clean chunk of bandwidth in exchange for the improvements made on the public safety side, to NexTel's ultimate deteriment - I believe, were well worth the costs NexTel incured. And you see the difference here? NexTel understood there was a problem...and paid to fix it. The same scenerio doesn't apply in this swap for the tried-and-true UHF T-band to get the magical 700 MHz D block...remember, you can't just blame the "Telecom Cartels" for this. The Public Safety Alliance and the IAFC agreed to this and NYSAFC pushed hard for passage of the Act too.
 
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rapidcharger

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Cities should just ignore the deadline and keep transmitting in the segment. Then, when the FCC and/or Congress tries to force the issue, there'll be a big publicity explosion on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc. and things will get straightened out in some intelligible manner.

Unfortunately it won't be because don't forget who owns all the media in this country and who those corporations have to answer to. They're answering to the same paymasters as congress. If you want to see how it'll be covered, just read every other article in this forum. Every single one of them.They'll either talk about doing away with BAPERN in a positive light or they won't talk about it at all. Usually it's the latter. They don't like to talk about waste and war profiteering.

I suggest a modification to that strategy.
I think a better way would be to start creating awareness now. Don't wait and don't count on mainstream media to help. This is a political issue and will need to be run like a political campaign. Which means there'll need to be lots of money to win over public opinion who'll be watching Fox and msnbc and hearing about how the transition to digital will keep us safe from terrorists. I'd say cnn too but cnn just covers the weather now. Anyway, you can't be passive. You can't sit back and wait for the media to come to the rescue because the media isn't on your side. Start a movement and gain support, especially locally. There's a better chance that the MA congresscritters will fight for an exemption than all the congresscritters in the country.
 
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DaveNF2G

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The trillions to be spent won't be "taxpayer dollars," at least not in any meaningful sense. It will all be funny money, printed by the Treasury under QE3, 4, ad infinitum, and having no intrinsic value whatsoever. We will all pay, but not in taxes. The payback will be the collapse of the American economy and total loss of what we now consider to be "our way of life."
 

zerg901

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I will pay for all the new radios with my bitzcoins.
 

902

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This entire mess was so poorly thought out by Congress that it blindsided everyone who was following the legislation. Mind you all, a previous version had 430-440 up on the chopping block and was staved off by an ARRL rally to action with many outraged amateur radio operators contacting their legislators (myself included). That particular idea was proposed during closed-door sessions by a ham who works in the wireless industry, by the way. Before that, some factions within Congress wanted EVERYTHING below the D-Block given back, including ALL of VHF and ALL of UHF. The prevailing thought by some Members of Congress was that there had to be some kind of quid pro quo "give back" for this spectrum - and that public safety was too "needy," not efficiently stewarding all of its resources effectively.

The legislation failed to account for millions (perhaps billions) of dollars worth of business/industrial users who also have rights to the spectrum - nor did it account for television broadcasters who have a far more powerful lobby than public safety and business/industrial licensees could ever wish for. So, for the moment, when T-Band goes away, so does the investment these system operators (Read: American business people) have made in their businesses. It's the equivalent to an eminent domain taking of farmland by Congressional fiat. There's no place to put public safety with ceteris paribus spectrum, let alone business/industrial. AND, nothing was ever mentioned about broadcasters. The presumption is that they stay, making the spectrum non-ubiquitous nationally, and therefore, less desirable for auction. IF this dopey idea moves forward, T-Band may become the whitespace brokerage (a handful of people will make tons of money being arbitrators and brokers).

Look at the paradigm shift in communications: we go from independent nodes of communications systems which are more or less bought once and amortized over time to a recurring cost model where an agency constantly pays for the use of the system as it goes along. In exchange, it abdicates its systems components to a benevolent entity (FirstNet) who will be their representative before whomever the contracted service vendor will be. So, the carrier makes money on subscriber fees, the manufacturers make money on much shorter life-cycled subscriber equipment (18 mos. for a "smartphone" vs. 25 years for a JEDI portable), app developers make money with upgrades and technology refreshes track the state of the art in networked systems. It is an entirely new revenue ecosystem.

For those coming up in the IT world, this is a very progressive outlook, but IT has a poor success rate for last-mile survivability in acute situations where the network is either overwhelmed or impaired - EVEN WITH various government mandated priority schemes (TSP/WPS), while infrastructure independent systems that are not heavily networked are usually the last line until they run out of power. A network solution has thousands of nodes, each being a point of vulnerability. While IT folk tell me that their networks are robust (there's lots of paths around an impairment), it sucks to be in the area isolated from the network. It also sucks when the network is burdened to capacity by an assault or is penetrated by an unknown actor, even with oodles of layers of crypto.

There are so many dynamics at play here. Just a few I've been thinking about - infrastructure dependent vs. infrastructure independent; communications through the networked vs. unit to unit simplex independent of a network (or recurring costs); local node recovery by bringing in a satellite truck and C.O.W vs. putting an antenna on a mast, setting up a base or repeater with a car battery, and talking... you all get the picture. This makes sense to some people (stockholders, primarily), just not to most of us.
 

2wayfreq

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It's most likely a T-band to 700Mhz no choice move. The problem with that is the 700Mhz coverage footprint will require a ton more sites than T-band equating to a huge financial burden to get it to cover just as well as T-band did, especially being digital.
 

902

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It's most likely a T-band to 700Mhz no choice move. The problem with that is the 700Mhz coverage footprint will require a ton more sites than T-band equating to a huge financial burden to get it to cover just as well as T-band did, especially being digital.
It probably wouldn't be a massively higher number of sites, but the packing in some regions cannot come close to accommodating T-Band use. For example, CAPRAD shows Bergen County (Region 8) as having only 7 25 kHz channels. With current technology, that would orphan the other 12.5 kHz of those frequencies. Maybe orphans from other implementations could be considered to increase the number of channels, but looking at a base number of 7 (potentially 12 simultaneous countywide talkpaths), the capacity of such system doesn't come close to the two trunked systems and number of smaller municipality discrete channel operations which occupy several dozen channels on various segments of T-Band.

Suffolk County, MA (where Boston is) has 18 12.5 kHz 700 MHz channels allotted. I didn't do an exhaustive search of ULS, but there are probably 4 dozen discrete T-Band pairs in use between BAPERN, the municipalities, the city itself, and surrounding communities. Sure, there would be a time-slotting efficiency gain from trunking, but I don't know how busy Boston can get. There might be nothing to trunk (continuous channel activity), unless the system was forever in transmission trunking.

The bigger issue is not that 700 needs more sites, but that the Responsible Radiation Control and System Design portion of many 700 MHz plans calls for exactly that - the containment of 80% of the signal to the primary service area and a 5 mile buffer area. That makes system design more expensive because a designer could not plop a big antenna on a high site and run max ERP. A system needs to be carefully tailored at that point. That's also bad news for scannerland because signals would saturate inside the area they serve and not much further. A little T-Band user can put up an omnidirectional antenna and set power to not interfere with co-channel users, but there would be no such thing as a little 700 MHz user, and the simulcast sites of a big 700 MHz user would need to be tailored with engineered antenna patterns and tilts. I'd bet the system would work better in the long run, but there would be added expense of implementation in doing all of that and getting the materials together.

In retrospect, if that were done with all of the spectrum resources from VHF to 800, public safety would be in much less of a bind for spectrum now than it is.

So, for the sake of the mandate on the FCC (they're scratching more than their heads on this, for sure), there is no like spectrum to give potentially displaced users like Boston... unless we can resurrect low band (which a lot of them ran away from years ago).

As far as analog vs. digital, there's a lot of material that indicates that digital can work to the advantage of lower signal levels in a well-designed system - however - the ambient noise thing still needs to be worked out. Also vocoded speech compression needs to be limited to a point where the audio doesn't sound as garbagy as cellular phones do these days.
 

KB1UAM

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Lets not forget about all the other UHF Mutual aid systems in the state. Plymouth county fire has a rather rigorous system as well as Bristol. Pretty much the whole state would have to change
 
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