Baltimore City Radio System Down

[ThePhotoGuy]

Hearing multiple reports that the Baltimore City Radio System has been down.


T.J. Smith‏Verified account @TJSmithMedia 19m19 minutes ago
More
Contingency plans in place for radio outage. Not affecting calls into 911. @BaltimorePolice operating on emergency channel.


Seems that some city users are using CMARC?

CMARC:

CMARC Event 1 - Fire Dispatch
CMARC Event 2 - Fire Box Alarms
CMARC Event 3 - Fire Box Alarms
Baltimore City Law Local

 

[marksmith]

Getting a strong signal but not much activity.

Hearing CMARC.

Also hearing limited periodic activity on the Baltimore City site.

SE Police, and a few others, like Roads 3.

Do all fire dept equipment have CMARC?

536/436/ws1095/996p2/996xt/325p2/396xt/psr800/396t/HP-1/HP-2 & others

 

[KR3LC]

It's 4:15 and they are still experiencing problems. Hearing activity for sure on CMARC and nearly dead quite on the city system. Strong signal in S. Baltimore but no activity to speak of.

 

[ThePhotoGuy]

Listening to recordings. It appears that Some Police units switched at 2:40 and were advised to communicate only in an Emergency.

 

[ThePhotoGuy]

Police units are currently switching back to the city system. Fire remains...

 

[ThePhotoGuy]

Fire switching back to normal talkgroups.

 

[AD9O]

They switched back to primary just as I switched my trunk-recorder setup from monitoring FIRST to CMARC (Time to add another dongle and try to capture both).

Sorry to any feed listeners for the outage on the city feed; I was at work and couldn't swap from the default config to the CMARC talk groups fast enough.

 

[ThePhotoGuy]

Fire spokeswoman Blair Adams said police and fire radio systems experienced a system failure after a planned software update. She said communication with units in the field was never lost, and 911 service was never interrupted.

Radio system back online for Baltimore police, fire crews after outage

 

[mmckenna]

The upside to all this is that they adapted to the outage quickly.
Some agencies have done rip-n-replace of their radio systems, tossing out the old systems and replacing it with a shiny new one. Trouble is when the new one fails, they have nothing to fall back on. Baltimore having the fall back system, and obviously training their users how to effectively use it, shows some pretty good planning.


As for the system failing after a software upgrade, usually software is well tested before it's rolled out to the customer, so unlikely its a fault in the software itself. More than likely it was a procedural issue or someone fat-fingered something.

 

[marksmith]

In terms of big systems failing, the response and corrective actions to get back online within a few hours has to be considered better than just a passing grade.

That they could that quickly swap to CMARC and then back, with what appears to be little impact on operations suggests a pretty good action plan for this sort if thing.

Also gave CMARC a reason to exist beyond Harford County and Martins fuel trucks.

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