AlaskaRadar said:
I fear that the next major disaster that happens will cause the system to collapse and therefore giving our brave first responders bricks to work with.
Am I totally out of line? I would like to hear your thoughts.. Thanks Radar
Well, a few points I can offer about your concern:
Eventually, all Fire Depts. (and Public Safety in general) are supposed to migrate to ALMR, so they'll be in the same "platform" to communicate.
All Fire Depts. and possibly Law Enforcement, will have the Mutual Aid talkgroups programmed into their radios, just like they do now with conventional channels.
There's some "gateways" in place so the old analog/incompatible radios can still talk through ALMR, just like Marine and Aviation frequencies can use the same gateway to talk through ALMR during incidents. There's also patches and such that can be done to have so-called interoperability although not the most desirable way to do it.
On even bigger incidents, everybody involved, will probably use the Incident Command talkgroup and procedures just like they've been in training the past few days, mostly using the IC North TAC1 and TAC2 recently. In other words, as long as they know how to use their radios and switch to the appropriate channels, they'll be able to communicate easier and better than before, which is the premise of the ALMR system and everybody switching to it.
The new radios have even more memory channels and capabilities than the old ones to have programmed all the current analog channels, the ALMR stuff and like 'Thunderbolt' brought up, the national interop assignments and then some. In other words, they'll be able to use and function in conventional, trunked, analog, digital, etc. In case the main system fails, they will most likely fall-back to using simplex frequencies in analog and digital modes.
The ALMR system is using a lot of the old infrastructure that their old systems used, so the risk is almost the same during a disaster to lose those towers and such and having to fallback to simplex.
I personally think the only possible new "handicap" could be the use of encryption, if they decide to use it. Most Fire depts. don't use or care to use encryption. It's like adding another point of possible failure i.e. radios that could possibly lose the programmed keys in them or were programmed incorrectly, won't be able to communicate or hear other radios for example. Obviously, you don't want that to happen during an emergency. So hopefully, all the agencies that migrate to ALMR, if equipped with encryption capable radios, they'll do like the majority of other agencies across the nation and use encryption only during special or "sensitive" operations.
