I work every day in the "Radio Interoperability" field. In the travels around the country that are frequent, I
find that it is not the equipment and gateways that are the limiting factors. It is the politics.
There are still to this day agencies that have people working in the radio systems as some sort of a
manager that still haven't herd of the "National Interoperability Frequencies" that have been set aside
for incident mutual aid communications. How much does the government have to do and how many
trade magazine articles have to be published and how many trade shows or training seminars have to
be held before these people wake up and see the light?
Even some of the agencies that have obtained gateways through the CEDAP program from DHS
are not using them. They are boxed up with all the manuals, cables and in some cases even the
radios, only to be stuffed into a closet. They are forgotten for months or years. People leave the
agencies and are replaced by a new person. They dig through all the clutter in the closet and discover
this magic box in the corner.
Then you run into the stand that many department heads take and say I don't need any mutual aid
channels in my radios. If we have something big, all the other departments that come to help us will
use "OUR" channels. Don't know about you, but I have never been able to squeeze a rock and get
any water out of it.
My grandfather use to talk about his mule that would work all day long out in the field plowing it up
for planting. They would take a break for lunch and that mule would be led over to the water trough.
Do you think my grandfather could get that mule to take a drink? Not a chance. That old mule was
just like some of these agency heads. Until they are ready for a change, it won't happen.
The author of the linked article may have a number of facts skewed, but at least the intent was in
the right direction. Virginia may be working through the issues with the STARS program, but the
people there saw a problem with interoperability and started a program called "COMLINC". They
saw early on that the state police "STARS" system would never provide all the agencies in the state
the needed interoperability. They figured that there would never be enough money available to change
every agency in Virginia over to the "STARS" project. Plus there would never be enough frequencies
available to make it work with all the heavy traffic.
The Virginia COMLINC project was originiated in the Lynchburg and Roanonke region. Today it has
expanded to include some 70 locations around Virginia. These location are the normal 911 dispatch
centers in the counties that are currently included in the system. Additional county locations are
being added as the funds are made available. Eventually the state police radio techs will take over the
maintenance of the RIOS gateways in many of the locations.
Will a country wide first responder radio and data systems ever be a reality? I don't know. However,
I will say that it is crazy to think that putting the entire country on the 700 band will solve all the
problems. That would require just an absurd number of sites to cover the entire country with a 95%
coverage. There is way too much open area in the middle of the country where a 700 band site is
too expensive to even consider. The range coverage is so low, that the number of sites goes way
up for regions where no one lives. Even along areas of the east coast, you will have trouble with
site coverages and no one lives there or that there is even a source of commercial power to run
the site on.
I could go on for a long time on the poor thought out planning that this country has done and is still
doing on radio systems. You think the federal government is doing any better in trying to come up
with a holy grail radio system for the first responders? It might help if they had a few people that
knew what radio propagation was all about and how to build radio sites. Until that happens, the
feds are just pouring our hard earned tax money down the bit bucket.
Jim
Just as some banks and companies are "too big to fail", some of these massive projects are simply too big to work.
In my opinion many interoperability problems are caused by a lack of experience and training. The equipment, especially trunking systems, have the capability.