California statewide P25 system

Status
Not open for further replies.

bryan_herbert

Member
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Oct 31, 2006
Messages
1,134
Location
Las Vegas, NV. DM26jc
LMR - so 2020s

FirstNet is where its at - even in East Death Valley Lower Junction

The trick will be to bring all wireless transmissions into 1 system with priority for the priority messages. There has to be some economy of scale here versus putting up a radio tower for every guard shack and outhouse.

FirstNet is not the answer. FirstNet operates on AT&T towers and everyone knows the first thing that goes down in disasters are cell towers.

Over the last 3 years, wireless service was down throughout the 395 corridor including Bishop, Inyokern, Ridgecrest, Trona, and Walker Junction, a total of 8 days for various reasons including severed trunked line and wire theft.

At EDC this year, the sole AT&T tower that services the area surrounding the Speedway and Nellis AFB overloaded and crashed multiple times. AT&T had to bring in a portable tower so service was reliable.
 

PrivatelyJeff

Has more money than sense
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Jun 5, 2016
Messages
1,055
Location
Kings County, CA
Over 250 million smartphones are in use in the USA. Number of smartphone users in the U.S. 2010-2023 | Statista

FirstNet is a very simple concept. FirstNet will utilize the consumer smartphone infrastructure to support public safety communications. Efforts will be made to fortify the network.

Yeah, still requires a backbone connection to work right and those go down all the time. Plus it’s going to require more towers to provide full coverage in areas that are sparsely populated.
 

norcalscan

Interoperating Spurious Emissions
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Feb 7, 2003
Messages
505
Location
The real northern california
FirstNet will utilize the consumer smartphone infrastructure

Not to turn this into a FirstNet thread, but the robustness built into most public safety LMR is vastly superior to the "consumer smartphone infrastructure."

Just in the Public Safety Power Shutoffs happening in California this last few years, multiple hundreds of cell sites lost power either immediately, within 4 hours or within 12 hours. Hundreds more had power, but had lost their backbone feed because some remote fiber hut probably only had 12hrs of battery, or a tree knocked down a fiber line on a pole 40 miles out of town. There are so many points of failure in the cell network it is absurd. And there is little to no incentive for the company to invest in that robustness. Consumers accept a cell tower lost power. They shrug it off as equal of a casualty of PSPS as the local hamburger shop losing power. They still pay their bill, and if anything, will accept the text from ATT that states, "We'd like to help out during this difficult time. If you live in one of the affected areas, you won't be charged for any talk/data/texting overages from 12am the 29th to 1159pm the 2nd." Crumbs the peasants eat up, despite not having service anyway. Far cheaper than investing in 96 hours of backup power at every-single-point of failure in their network. A public safety site going down, within minutes, would be debilitating for every served agency.

Granted voice PTT is just one tiny facet of FirstNet. It can provide a massive compliment to existing LMR. However the cell system has a long way to go to become more than just a "best effort" kind of service for Public Safety.
 

Paysonscanner

Active Member
Joined
Mar 1, 2019
Messages
650
Where is the "East Death Valley Lower Junction?"

I just made that up for illustrative purposes. Apparently was not too illustrative. Sorry.

I guess you were trying to say that FirstNet extends to remote areas. When I was in college the expression among the backpacking/climbing students segment of the student body was "Elephants Butt, Montana." I'm not sure why this expression was used as most of those people wanted to live in little, out of the way towns. I was a nursing student that happened to love tiny towns, backpacking and some technical climbing.
 

Paysonscanner

Active Member
Joined
Mar 1, 2019
Messages
650
Over 250 million smartphones are in use in the USA. Number of smartphone users in the U.S. 2010-2023 | Statista

FirstNet is a very simple concept. FirstNet will utilize the consumer smartphone infrastructure to support public safety communications. Efforts will be made to fortify the network.

The AT&T network covers rural areas very poorly. Late Hubby and I always had Verizon phones. Hubby had a county AT&T cell phone for a little while. We carried it when we traveled to Elephants Butt, Montana. We had far better coverage with Verizon. The disadvantage is the poor customer service Verizon had at the time. We would drive some remote areas, such as U.S. 6 from Tonopah to Ely, Nevada and not have any AT&T coverage for some long stretches and only some short stretches of no coverage on Verizon. The same applied to remote areas in Utah, Idaho, Montana and Eastern Oregon. In both wilderness and very remote areas with only dirt roads, there isn't any coverage and there never will be. We started to carry those handheld GPS/help button devices as soon as they came out. We found a lot of areas where we could not get a satellite connection. Sometimes we could only get one, which is kinda useless for fixing a position. One of my favorite USFS ranger stations is that of the Flathead NF's Spotted Bear Ranger District. They fully staff the place for about 6-8 months of the year and move into a facility in Hungry Horse, Montana for the winter. There was no cell phone coverage there when Hubby and I drove there and beyond to a trailhead to access the Bob Marshall Wilderness. It's located about 50-60 miles south of Hungry Horse. Cell coverage was poor on most of the drive to there and AT&T was flat dead. I can't recall if they used satellite phones there or not.
 
Last edited:

KK6ZTE

Member
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Mar 27, 2016
Messages
895
Location
California
I have to carry two phones because ATT doesn't cover my 108k population town worth a crap. Verizon does much better, but I do have to rotate depending on where I am, and that's being within a couple miles of the major N/S highway at almost all times.

The amount of smartphones in use in the USA is irrelevant and I don't see how it matters.
 

Paysonscanner

Active Member
Joined
Mar 1, 2019
Messages
650
I have to carry two phones because ATT doesn't cover my 108k population town worth a crap. Verizon does much better, but I do have to rotate depending on where I am, and that's being within a couple miles of the major N/S highway at almost all times.

The amount of smartphones in use in the USA is irrelevant and I don't see how it matters.

I think of AT&T's marketing. This might be similar to other company's marketing as well. Their commercials often contain the phrase that their "networks cover 90% of all Americans." Some others claim a higher number. As you say it doesn't matter how many cell phones are on a network because it says nothing about coverage. In 2010 the census said over 80% of all U.S. citizens lived in metro areas. I think the percentage will increase a few points in the 2020 census cause the average age of rural residents seems to be rising. So these networks only pick up less than half of the rural population? That reveals the truth of network coverage. This picture I've just painted is overly optimistic as far as the network coverage too, a lot of rural areas are not populated at all. Look at how many new electronic sites were built to cover most, but not all, paved highways in Nevada. NHP was on lowband VHF and then changed over to an 800 meg EDACS system. I think it required more than 4 times as many sites for just the paved road areas. Hubby knew all this stuff, but I helped him program our GRE scanners for Nevada. Where we lived in California we had a bunch of tourist traffic due to national and state parks in the Sierra and historic Highway 49, with lots of overnight use in our small town. AT&T worked in town sorta ok and didn't work at all until 6-8 years ago. After a couple years the county switched to Verizon and it didn't cover the whole county either. We often crossed the Sierra on State Highways 4, 108 and 120 to travel east and any radio coverage was marginal, with the CHP and USFS, as well as Yosemite NP often having the ONLY coverage in those areas. Highway 108 radio coverage for most agencies ends a few miles east of Strawberry and all the way to the crest. That is a large area of no coverage.

Curious that a city of 108K lacks good AT&T coverage. Hubby and I lived in a town that was about 2% that size. If AT&T does a poor job in a large city of that size then I think their 90% of all Americans claim is way out of line (fraudulent claim?).
 

scannerboy02

Member
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Nov 16, 2004
Messages
2,046
Had anyone found control channels for any of the sites in the central part of the state yet?

According to the coverage map they should have sites at,
Pine Hill - BEE00-9D2-001-001 - 769.40625 (was active while I was in the area back in November)
Oso - BEE00-9D2-001-002 - 769.96875 (was active while I was in the area back in November)
Bullion -
Joaquin Ridge -
Blue Ridge -
Round Mountain -
 

ke6ats

Member
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Feb 21, 2012
Messages
93
@ KG7PBS- Sorry for the delay in replying. I should probably, I suppose, clarify my statement. I am in no way second-guessing those at OES that are asking for the funds for the project, nor am I indicating that such a project is not a good idea.
My comment was to indicate that no matter how the folks who truly understand the need and have the knowledge to design and install an actual working system as proposed, I just cannot see it becoming a reality. Why? Because the State of California is undeniably run by "educated idiots". No matter how many hours, days. weeks, months or years the good folks at OES try, I would bet a months pay that IF they are given ANY funds to begin said project, it will soon go away to be used for much more "pressing" projects. Probably something like a study to determine if staring at the sun with your eyelids super-glued open might truly cause you to suffer eye injury. That is, in fact how the "Great State of California" operates. In addition, at EVERY level of management, within EVERY agency, we have way to many extremely unqualified idiots running the show and WAY too many "empire-builders" that, unfortunately get what they want. Public safety and Public service DO NOT fit into the ideals of those people. Let me reiterate: I have absolutely NO ill will towards OES or anyone employed by that agency. I know those employees are intelligent, educated, and do give a crap about the communications needs of such a diverse State. Sadly, the powers that be who will decide where the dollars are allocated are, to put it mildly, completely incompetent and grossly corrupt.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top