I wonder when the shoe is going to drop and the 800lb (no pun intended) digital gorilla in the room is going to get recognized. This is from a fairly well publicized tragic event in my neck of the woods a while back.
link
But problems crop up when more than one firefighter tries to talk at once, resulting in firefighters getting a busy signal when they try to call and in garbled transmissions due to background noise like engines and burning buildings. In addition, metal construction blocks communication when firefighters are inside large buildings like downtown high rises or hospitals.
“We’re finding out this is happening every day, not just in big fires,” said B.J. Jetter, Sycamore Township Fire Chief and president of the Hamilton County Fire Chiefs Association.
I still have friends that are firefighters (I was one as well some time ago---pre digital days)
The shortcomings of digital systems are well known on the fireground. How many more lives is it going to cost before folks either demand systems that work as advertised, or go back to what really worked well.
I never remember one issue using UHF radios during my day. Trunked (even analog systems) always had issues in commerical structures. So much so, that the local comm center set-aside one 800 frequency for dedicated simplex communications for this very situation, as the trunked system could never get your request out of the building for some reason.....
Those 800 radios scared me even back in the day. IT would appear that progress has moved us backwards in the name of sexy sounding technical communications systems that appear to be falling on their face.