Millions in federal emergency communications funding lost, diverted

[jim202]

Take a look here to read some of the interesting story yourself. I know this thread started with this link, but it needs to get read by everyone. Pass it along to get the word out to everyone. It's our tax money and the federal government that has allowed this to happen.

WASHINGTON: Millions in federal emergency communications funding lost, diverted | Motorola radios | McClatchy DC

 

[12dbsinad]

The story says Mother M has "proprietary" features in their broadband handsets... so how is this whole FirstNet thing supposed to work again??

 

[mmckenna]

The story says Mother M has "proprietary" features in their broadband handsets... so how is this whole FirstNet thing supposed to work again??

Easy, Mother M's attitude is that as long as you buy only Motorola gear, only Motorola accessories, only Motorola t-shirts and only drink the Motorola Kool-Aid, everything is interoperable…..

 

[iamhere300]

Interoperability is at the mercy of the commanders on scene. If they don't want to use it, it will never happen. Bottom line is we can provide the equipment and technology, but if the management don't want it, your never going to change their mind.

So much for inter agency interoperability. Same thing goes for trying to get the different vendors to play in the same sandbox. Mother M will go out of their way to put road blocks in the way to allow other vendors to play well on their radio systems. They spend months playing with the radio firmware to exclude other vendor radios from interfacing smoothly on their trunking systems. They have spent years fighting the P25 open standards from being truly open to allow other vendor radios to play together.

What else would you expect from the largest vendor in the country?

Totally correct. It all comes back to the feet on the ground. If they don't use the equipment, the equipment will never work.

 

[SCPD]

radios

Totally correct. It all comes back to the feet on the ground. If they don't use the equipment, the equipment will never work.

And sometimes the equipment doesn't work all by itself(radio failures,a system thats setup wrong and lacks range,and dont forget dead spots)
If it was done right the first time,it would still be working.....
Explain how some towns are fine with VHF Highband and SPEN?in analog.
IT WORKS!

 

[mmckenna]

"Lawmakers request DHS investigation into Motorola Anticompetitive Allegations"

MissionCritical Communications, Radio Resource International, and Public Safety Report - wireless voice and data communications for mobile, remote and public safety operations

 

[dcr_inc]

For $6000.00 you can buy several ANALOG NAROW BAND portables that communicate just fine.. With One or Two NATIONAL interop channels in each band, Oh Ya, their called ICALL, VCALL, 8CALL and UCALL channels already, You can have everybody talking and doing their mission TOGETHER.. Heck, Throw in an ACU 1000 gateway with GOOD radios and you can have the world communicating together for the price of several 6K Portables...

 

[SCPD]

It's amazing but sad that there is no more accountability in government today. It must be nice to tax people and" blow the money" out the window and have no remorse what so ever.

 

[flythunderbird]

It's amazing but sad that there is no more accountability in government today. It must be nice to tax people and" blow the money" out the window and have no remorse what so ever.

Welcome to 21st-century government. :evil: And that's EXACTLY how it works.

 

[mikegilbert]

But this would take all the wind out of the sails of the Race to Waste profiteers. Using their stooges with corporate media, they promulgate misinformation and demonstrate to the unknowing public that there is a "crisis" in desperate need of a "solution".

Of course no one wants to be the one denying "the boys in blue the tools they need to do their jobs" and DARE ask, why are we buying "$6000 walkie talkies" and costly infrastructure in places where it clearly is not needed?

It's all part of the massive scam that is our bought and paid for corrupt Federal government, in the back pockets of those contractors' who solely exist to drain the taxpayers even more and further increase our debt.

I am surprised Mclatchy has the gonads to go after "Solutions" the way they are.

Take the Money and Run - Steve Miller Band Live From Chicago - YouTube

Amen!

 

[cortchubby]

Illinois starcom....

had occasion to see/use one of "them there" fancy Starcomm 12 radios in Illinois.
To me it looked like and used like a fancy oversized Cell Phone and I HAD TO WAIT for a system acknowledgement in order to transmit.
As to the waste of money on this 6000 brick, I offer this...

The area I was in is already covered byPRESENT EXISTING CHANNELS)

ISPERN
IREACH
ESMARN
POINT TO POINT
NIFERN
All 8 firegrounds (simplex on scene with prospective base station coverage)
UHF ISPERN (both of them)
COOK COUNTY "old" VHF Repeater system (all FOUR FREQS)

In my opinion this new "super duper secret encrypted" radio is a waste of money and as was proven when the ISP 800 Meg system went on line,an IMMEDIATE risk to Officer Safety.
The "need" to encrypt ect is nothing more than Government Paranoia as proper dispatching protocol will stop any "critical" comm from being xmitted over the air. It wastes money,degrades signal output power and in some cases simply doesnt work. What this IS here is a mad dash to spend money allotted to
PSR COMM.The same holds true for the venerable "narrow banding" which in my opinion was nothing more that Motorola clawing at the pot of gold and lobbying to make that happen. Too many times,Chicago has already lamented the narrrow band in that it DOESNT WORK like the "old" system does. It boils down to a viable method of frequency management mutual aid and alternate secondary frequencies. Oddly enough,outside the ring of death (Cook County/Chicago) there are plenty of "old" systems that work more than adequately and have since the '70s. While its always nice to hear a Southern Illinois patrolman talk about "the nifty walkie talkie that goes 300 miles" those of us that are in the know about it know differently.ON PAPER this all was a great idea and theory.However its a totally different story when you have an offender face down at gun point and have to walk circles around him to get a system acknowledgement tone. (know THAT first hand) I was and will always be against this new "statewide" system since what we already have in place is far more that adequate.Bottom line is this was a stampede by major radio manufacturers and their lobbyists to death grip the pot of Federal Gold.

 

[Motorola90]

Missing Funds

The Funds went to those Terrorist Countries that Hate Us.
Remember the 470 to 512 band where that is going. Jobs law. To put more of a Spin on the USA
with more lies!

 

[b52hbuff]

So what does this mean for the folks who monitor SF public safety? Does this mean that SF will continue with their 800MHz TRS? Will they abandon the 700MHz TRS? If they're not going to use the 700MHz TRS, they might as well turn it off...

 

[iamhere300]

had occasion to see/use one of "them there" fancy Starcomm 12 radios in Illinois.
.

While there where any number of reasons to go to a new system, Starcomm was/is probably not the right answer.

BTU Cortchubby, I had been meaning to ask, what exactly is "contract law enforcement" in the Chicago area?

 

[cortchubby]

Re Contract Law Enforcement

To answer your question, Contracted Law Enforcement can be seen on BNSF trains (these are NOT railroad police but contracted off duty or retired LEO) In one area in chicago,there is contracted off duty police Patrolling the area surrounding Marquette Park and its called Special Service Area 14. In CHA (chicago housing) after the actual police were dissolved,there was and still is contracted law enforcement in the housing projects. No,this is NOT a civilian armed guard service. The requirement is that employees either are or have retired from a law enforcement agency. PRetty lucrative from a money standpoint for the contractor,but hopefully that answered your question.

 

[ko6jw_2]

The great myth of interoperability is that everyone has a need to talk to everyone else on an ad hoc basis. From a tactical point of view this will create chaos. In other words, just because they can does not mean they should. To be used correctly there must be a central point where all communications are monitored with the command authority to direct units to coordinate on interoperable channels. This is done all the time in my area where we have 10 fire agencies. In a mutual aid dispatch all responding units are give a command channel and a tac frequency for that incident. This is what interoperability is about.

One the other hand, we have one police agency that uses a P25 encrypted system. No one can monitor them including other law enforcement agencies who still use narrow band FM. Why are they encrypted and no one else is? A previous police chief got angry of press coverage of some abuses by his officers and ordered the system. Who cares if no one else can hear them? They don't.

It all comes down to training. We have a three county mutual aid law system that is never used. We have simplex mutual aid channels (CLEMARS) that are in all police vehicles and never used. The obvious solution is to spend even more money (vast amounts) for an interoperable system that will be so complex that no one will use it. It will be approved by politicians who have no knowledge of radio and funded by manufacturers whose main interest is profit.

 

[mikepdx]

Of course no one wants to be the one denying "the boys in blue the tools they need to do their jobs"
and DARE ask, why are we buying "$6000 walkie talkies" and costly infrastructure in places where it clearly is not needed?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVA1xRrWBuk

This reminds me of "The Emperor Wears No Clothes ",
where everyone dares not speak the obvious truth.

It's not PC to question enormous comm purchases for
those who keep us safe from the "terrorists".
If you do, to some, it's akin to aiding terrorism
and criminals.

Several years ago, when our state started the conversation
about a statewide trunked system.
I went to one of the original meetings on the subject.

They were explaining how a trooper will be able to stand
on the beach at the Pacific Ocean with a portable
and talk to another trooper on a portable 300+ miles
away at the Idaho border.

At question & answer time, I raised my hand and asked,
Under what conceivable emergency would a portable
to portable contact between troopers be necessary across the entire state?

The gave me the deer-in-the-headlights look.
As if I were speaking a foreign language.
They had no answer, except "a large incident".
I got several glares from the main 'cheerleaders'.
You'd think I had desecrated Old Glory or something.

I was the ONLY average citizen who bothered to attend.

 

[ko6jw_2]

In the late 1970's Santa Barbara County started building a 460Mhz system for all law enforcement agencies. Previously the sheriff operated on 45Mhz with a remote base on a high peak. It worked reasonably well. They believed, despite warnings from the ham radio community, that they could operate the same way on UHF. That failed and now we have multiple mountain tops and microwave links and the system works fairly well.

Next they got five 800Mhz channels to launch a trunked county wide system. The number of sites would have to increase again. Saner views prevailed and the system was never built. The channels are being used, but not as part of a trunked system.

I'm sure the radio salespeople are disappointed.

The post from mikepx is typical. There is no input from the public. If you ask, "Do you want police and fire personnel to have the tools to make you safe and fight terrorism?" People will answer yes. If you ask, "Do you want to spend billions of dollars on a communication system that is not needed and may never work?" The will answer no. You have to ask the right question, if you're a politician or a salesperson, you won't ask that question.

 

[MrAntiDigital]

I think the real truth is finely starting to come out. For some, it's the idea of "we got to have the newest and latest thing". It's got to be the best, right.

Just a few months ago on other web sites, I was reading how great these new radio systems are. There were various problems already starting to show up in some of our larger cities. The very high cost to taxpayers for something that wasn't really necessary, but purchased anyway. Nobody was asking the right questions because the politicians were taking care of the salesmen and the salesmen were taking care of the politicians. All in the name of public safety.

The biggest clue that something was wrong should have been when New York City did NOT go to this system. Yet this is where everybody pointed the blame on this interoperability thing. But NYC was smart enough not to waste huge sums of money on a new toy like many smaller cities did. They tried it out in one part of Brooklyns EMS and it wasn't what was expected so they went back to UHF. It seems that a huge UHF band of radios is working just fine for the emergency services of NYC, protecting some 7 or 8 million people. I think that's a pretty good sales pitch in itself.

 

[KB2ZY0]

Didn't a Very Wise Man once say:
" The more they Overtrck the Plumbing, the more they Stop up the Drain"?

Well, I always thought that going Digital was a major Overtick, given the Cost Vs. Usefulness factor. Spending MILLIONS or even HUNDREDS of Millions in Taxpayer Dollars on Fancy Digital Radio Systems that are far more costly and way more less efficient than Good O'l fashioned Analog Radio makes absolutely no sense, especially in " Small Community " Clusters such as I live in. No town that has Less than 10K in Population and a very small Town Budget should be forced to buy or rent radio equipment they can barely or not afford at all, just because their much bigger neighbor 35 miles down the street demands it. To me, it sounds like simple Playground Bullying.