MARCS Steering Committee Meeting 12/22/2020

[tweiss3]

Maybe I'm out of the loop, but what happened in Stark County that triggered this?

Stollen radios and spoofing IDs

 

[N8WCP]

Six charged in pirated police radio investigation

Five men have been arrested and a sixth is at large after a yearlong investigation into pirated and clone public safety radios. Most of those accused work

www.cantonrep.com

 

[N8WCP]

It's been shared verbally by MARCS staff and discussed at SIEC meetings.

True, but my impression is it applied only to new radios activated on the system. No discussion that I was a part of included existing XTL/XTS. Guess we'll need to wait for the official notice. If it does include the older radios our county will be looking at $201K in flashes alone.

 

[N8WCP]

Might be off topic but is there an extra charge per radio for ENC?

I don't believe MARCS charges an additional fee to use encryption, we don't in Summit. Encryption is end-to-end and no additional network resources are used to process encrypted calls. You will likely incur fees from your radio vendor to program the radios for encryption and load keys and this assumes your radios already have encryption installed. If you're dispatched by a center using MCC7500 consoles they will also need encryption installed in the VPM and keys loaded.

 

[wa8pyr]

True, but my impression is it applied only to new radios activated on the system. No discussion that I was a part of included existing XTL/XTS. Guess we'll need to wait for the official notice. If it does include the older radios our county will be looking at $201K in flashes alone.

I was advised (and so were my vendors) that it applied to all radios old or new, but that the deadline was 2025 to give everybody time to get existing radios updated or replaced as needed. The official announcement will tell, but I'd be very surprised if existing radios aren't included; there are so many out there now (many of which will be around for a long time) that implementing LLA for security without requiring it of existing radios means you might as well not even bother with it. And if it weren't required, Motorola and Harris wouldn't be offering special pricing on the flash upgrades.

I feel your pain, though. With labor and installation figured in, across the county I'm looking at around $100,000 in upgrade costs and around another $400,000 in replacement radio costs (to replace radios which can't be upgraded). Our subscriber agencies will have to bear that cost, but at least spread out over 5 years it will be a bit easier.

I would be happy if they give me a tiny exemption for my EOC console radios, though. . . I'd like to put off that headache long enough to convince the Commissioners that I need new consoles in the EOC.

 

[a388sig2]

Personally I wish they had implemented it from the word go

Do you think it was a cost savings initially, or just the ability to allow older equipment on the system?

It’s proven to be highly negligent in system design to allow users to be so easily put at risk of something like the Stark clone cases.

For as guarded as their people are about basic floor plan infrastructure records, lack of LLA seems to be a pretty big security flaw they let go for years. Maybe it was just tunnel vision?

 

[kf8yk]

Do you think it was a cost savings initially, or just the ability to allow older equipment on the system?

It didn't exist when the system was in the initial planning stages. Radio authentication wasn't available until system version 7.9, XTS/XTL subscribers need version R15 or higher firmware.

 

[scanman75]

To mandate agencies to use Marcs is ridiculous, I was a Police Officer for 15 years and had the pleasure of using the Marcs system, we had a tower in our city and when you were inside a building, like a school the audio would be garbled or you just couldn't receive or transmit using a portable. The old Vhf high band portables using a vehicle repeater to Marcs never had an issue. I hope they never mandate this because officer safety comes to mind, your radio is your lifeline and Marcs is not that great inside buildings.

 

[wa8pyr]

MARCS is not that great inside buildings.

A broad generalization like that is highly inaccurate. In-building coverage depends entirely upon your location in relation to the tower and the building construction; in our county, it works pretty well, although there are naturally some places where it isn't too good (which is true of any radio system).

In any case, the proposed law in question is dead (for the moment), and since Ohio is a Home Rule state, you could expect a number of legal challenges to such a requirement; should the City of Cleveland, Parma (et al), the Northwest Ohio folks or Mahoning County (among others) dump their systems and jump over to MARCS just because MARCS has delusions of grandeur and got some nitwit state assembly critter to propose a law? That wold be a nifty fireworks show.

 

[W8UU]

A VHF or UHF mobile repeater feeding a MARCS radio is quite common in southeast Ohio. It works well.

 

[wa8pyr]

A VHF or UHF mobile repeater feeding a MARCS radio is quite common in southeast Ohio. It works well.

We use 800 MHz Pyramid repeaters with tight RX pre-filters and they work well, but what @scanman75 was getting at was MARCS portables inside buildings without a vehicle repeater in use.

I'm personally a proponent of vehicle repeaters, especially if it's a 700 or 800 MHz model with proper filtering which can be used with the regular MARCS portable radio; a single-band portable is all that's needed, and a whole flock of vehicle repeaters are a heck of a lot cheaper than a full-blown ASR site.

 

[amcferrin90]

To mandate agencies to use Marcs is ridiculous, I was a Police Officer for 15 years and had the pleasure of using the Marcs system, we had a tower in our city and when you were inside a building, like a school the audio would be garbled or you just couldn't receive or transmit using a portable. The old Vhf high band portables using a vehicle repeater to Marcs never had an issue. I hope they never mandate this because officer safety comes to mind, your radio is your lifeline and Marcs is not that great inside buildings.

And that's why the Ohio Building Code and Ohio Fire Code were modified to require a minimum of -95 dBm in 95% of all new and now existing buildings for public safety radio use. Unfortunately it's the fire people making this push. Law Enforcement can work together with the building departments and start pushing this. Granted if done by hacks you're going to add to the noise floor but the requirements to do these systems is intensifying quickly. If done right, these BDA systems sit idle until a radio transmits from inside a building. Then the uplink amplifier kicks on. I'm planning this quarter to go visit some rural building departments to make sure they're aware of this. My company is on the list with Bob Bill so if you're in public safety and interested in learning, get with Bob to get the list. That way I'm not making a shameless plug. If I need to tweak this let me know.

 

[wd8chl]

<snip>. If done right, these BDA systems sit idle until a radio transmits from inside a building. Then the uplink amplifier kicks on. I'm planning this quarter to go visit some rural building departments to make sure they're aware of this.

Not exactly. They actually amplify the incoming signal, so there can be no output until there is an input.

 

[ohiodesperado]

Yeah, this is honestly a double edged sword. The state trying to mandate a migration to MARCS by all agencies would be a tough sell.
The biggest reason for getting folks to move that way would be interoperability. If village X is on their old VHF system and has a major issue in their jursdiction requiring outside assistance and everyone that shows up is on MARCS, then the village is sort of left out of their own issue. There is of course patching that can be done by a dispatcher IF they have both MARCS and the village VHF on their console, but depending on the level of dispatch center (some places are still dispatching themselves via a base radio) that might not be an option. So this can become a problem either way.

Now as far as DAS / BDA systems.
If you read the OFC 510 carefully, the -95dbm in the building is not the number that building owners need to be concerned with (even though it's what most are measured against, the -95 dbm receive level at the TOWER from teh subscriber unit and not the 10 db above the noise floor which was the standard is a tough number to achieve from in a building. Figure that you start out with 50 db (100 watts) from most site repeaters. That goes through a combiner that is 3 db of loss and then another 3 db of cable loss. Now you are at 25 watts (44 dbm) then what ever path loss (about 120db) then a 20 db building attenuation, and you are at -95 in the building. So here's the problem. Path loss and building loss are BOTH reciprocal meaning the repeater has it and so does the subscriber. Problem is that the subscriber is not 50dbm (100 watts) it's only 36 dbm (4 watts) so when you run the numbers back the other way... if a building measures at -95dbm internally, there isn't a possibility that the subscriber will be able to achieve -95 dbm at the repeater site.

And addressing the noise floor issue. That is why the IFC and OFC hve now made additional rulings as well as City of Columbus requiring training and FCC approved equipment be used and not some crap off eBay. That being said, there were a number of those systems that were put in that little to no engineering was done on them and they ARE running up the noise floor. The better quality stuff has a 'squelch' control to turn off the uplink (inside > outside) part of the BDA. But there are also still NEXTEL BDA's out there that are running that have widow filters in them that cover the whole public safety talkin frequency spectrum that were also just sort of set to a point that they worked and then left to run at whatever level they were set to. I had dealings with one that was installed improperly on the North East part of Columbus that took the FC system off line for a number of hours a few years ago. It was a high power unit (most are 2 watts total output, this one was 4 watts) and it was set to make the place glow going both ways. That specific manufacture would ship their units with 0 attenuation (turned clear up) and the installer was responsible to turn it down. Hacks will get a radio for the system and look at the bars.... if they have 4 bars, it's good. All the other manufactures (or at least the ones I deal with) have their units coming out of the box set to the minimum gain possible.

 

[jrl44430]

My township and the city next to me are both on the same MARCS ENC system. Because they use different encryption keys they can not talk to each other.

 

[ohiodesperado]

My township and the city next to me are both on the same MARCS ENC system. Because they use different encryption keys they can not talk to each other.

They could if they wanted to but it would require multikey in their radios and having both keys. But they can switch over to an XCOMM channel that is required to be in their radios and NOT be encrypted and talk there. Having encrypted channels in a radio does not mean the whole radio is encrypted, only the specific TG's that are designated to be secure. ANd even then, depending on programming they can give the user the option to turn off the encryption.

 

[jrl44430]

That is very interesting. The chief told me they opted for encryption because they do not have a Tac channel. The most excitement they get is when someone's horses get loose.

 

[a388sig2]

That is very interesting. The chief told me they opted for encryption because they do not have a Tac channel. The most excitement they get is when someone's horses get loose.

That chief should be disciplined or fired, and you should be writing letters to your elected officials demanding exactly what they're hiding from the public?

 

[jrl44430]

He said sensitive information like SSN'S given over the air.

 

[a388sig2]

He said sensitive information like SSN'S given over the air.

No department should be using SSN’s over the air. Only OL, Name and DOB.