Brad - I am not trying to be wise guy and pick apart your ideas here, rather since I am involved
everyday with network infrastructure and portable/mobiles on a large scale just trying to give
you and your county the benefit of my experience so please do not take some of my comments
the wrong way as I mean no dis-respect.
We understand that a scanner is not the optimal receiver for the radio test; however the part that you can not see from the video is that the scanner audio is being fed directly by a high quality audio cable into a production quality camera that we borrowed. The reason we did this was to eliminate any background noise or potential for contamination from outside noise. The radio transmission you hear from the scanner is “pure” audio coming directly out of the scanner.
This is irellevant.
Our county is going through the process of getting a completely new radio infrastructure. To date, we really don’t know what the end design will be, however we have the budget money to get radios now. This means that we are testing radios that will work for us now, and on the new system. This also means that as the system moves forward, it’s likely that every one of the 26 other fire and EMS agencies in the county will have a different brand of radio, set up differently.
If you do not know what type of system it will be how can one purchase radio gear optioned correctly
for it. Will it be conventional analog, conventional digital, analog trunking, digital trunking????
What type of system it is will have a bearing on what radios will function on the system and also have
a bearing on the cost of the radios. Someone in your county gov must know and let you know in
advance so you can make the proper purchases. It is also likely that someone in the county that
is in the know about the network infrastructure will have to make some ground rules as to what
mobile/portable radio equipment is usable and what is not. Allowing all these seperate agencies
to use so many different radio gear brands can lead to trouble, for example: The network infrastructure
gets a software or firmware upgrade on all the base stations and then all of a sudden brand X portables
no longer can communicate with dispatch. The FD or EMS agency in question protests to county that
they are now responsible for getting all of their portables working in a hurry. This is just one example
of what can happen when too many hands are in the cooking pot so to speak. My point is there has to
be some control maintained by the county on county network infrastructure and there may be some
rules to adhere to.
This was a real life test for us. We are firefighters who will actually be using these radios in the field, not radio engineers who are testing them to sell them. If you are a firefighter and not a radio engineer you better understand that we do not operate under ideal conditions for these radios and that’s what needs to be tested more than any other aspect of their performance.
Exactly the reason you don't want to make a decision based on what you hear on a scanner, and
the radio engineers you just dissed are very much up on the audio problem issues and have made
a lot of firmware changes to accomodate high ambient noise levels in many models which is what
you may have already benefited from in your testing with the high noise levels.
One of the other criticisms we are hearing is regarding the programming not being optimal for the test. Most departments don’t have the luxury of a dedicated radio shop to continually tweak programming. We took these radios as they would have been delivered to us and put them to a true to life firefighter test. We understand that there are some times settings which might improve results for some radios, but we don’t want to have a firefighter get hurt because he couldn’t communicate only to find that his radio should have been sent to us with better programming in the first place.
All the more reason that the county may have to standardize on a small group of models perhaps
across two or three brands. With too many brands this can get out of hand in a hurry.
I hope that I can answer any other questions you might have regarding our test. Based on comments that we have been getting we may conduct another test with some adjustments to procedure. Ultimately what we’ve achieved from our test being posted is the ability to network with other people who have dedicated far more time, and have far greater resources, than a small combination full time/volunteer department in Maple Bluff Wisconsin.
Brad A. Ingersoll
Asst. Chief
Maple Bluff Fire Department
I hope I and others on RR can answer any other of your questions as well.