Old [radio] system worked

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Thunderbolt

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PHILADELPHIA, Pa. - When the police commissioner and Fraternal Order of Police president agree that something is wrong, it's a good bet that something's wrong.And that something is the $52 million police radio system installed by Motorola - a system with a troubled history of going down and leaving police officers without communications.

Both Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and FOP President John McNesby are adamant that the system needs to be fixed.

The safety of officers, and by extension the public they serve, is the issue.

The problem is that Motorola has had years to fix the problems with the balky system and it's still not fixed.

Do these kinds of problems plague other police departments? Is Philadelphia the only city where these issues keep coming back?

The police who put their lives on the line to protect us want answers, and we who pay the bills for $52 million boondoggles want answers as well.

Perhaps the city needs to look beyond Motorola, file a suit to recover whatever money it can for a system that is unreliable, and find a company that can provide a reliable radio system.

Police departments across the nation have moved from 400 megaHertz systems to 800 megaHertz systems that provide a measure of security and reliability, at least on paper.

The old 400 mHz system was aged, but it had one large advantage over the newer system; it worked.

The city is giving Motorola notice that the system needs to be fixed, and soon. The problem with that is that there have been four years to make the system work, and it still breaks down.

RoxReview
 

fineshot1

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Fyi

Reader beware - this article does not represent all the facts.

Even though I do not have all the facts I do know that the city has made
some bad decisions in the operation & maintenance of this trunk system.

So they can call moto out on the carpet but that is a smoke screen to cover
the cities history of bad decisions and not listening to recomedations that
they should have taken into consideration.
 

RocketNJ

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Wasn't the outage caused by a lightning hit?

Does Philly call the local utility to the carpet when the power goes out in a storm?

Other outages were caused by Verizon techs disconnecting live T1 circuits. Motorola got the blame for that one too.
 

Cowthief

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Motorola Trunking.

Hello.

The city of Dallas Texas went to MotoTrunk a while back, and returned to UHF.
Houston, likewise, UHF.
San Antonio went to M/A-Com Pro-Voice from Mototrunk, in part due to the fact that the old GE system worked.
Dallas is again working with Motorola, but wants an open P-25 system, "No Motorola extensions of the standard".
So, it is not just Philly.
 

letarotor

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Wrong INFO

"The city of Dallas Texas went to MotoTrunk a while back, and returned to UHF."

WRONG: It was in fact a multisite Erricson EDACs system that the City contracted to be built for the fire department. Erricson couldn't get it to work, even though they had installed radios in most of the fire trucks. The City ended up canceling the contract and loosing about 8-million in the deal. The fire department had been on VHF conventional before this, and then switched to conventional UHF following the Erricson debacle. Now Fire Rescue and Police units have each other's frequencies in each others radios. What a concept!!!

The City of Dallas Communications Services built out and has been operating a three site 800MHz Motorola Type IIi system for city services (other than police and fire) for nearly 20-years now, and it is quite frankly an excellent system with few if any problems ever experienced.

Mark
 
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After working for two companies that dealt closely with moto it would not surprise me that it does not work reliably.. I myself will never own another moto product that I can control (can't get away from the embedded products very easily)
 

Septa3371CSX1

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Last term I did a proposal for my technical writing class on how to fix this system. The option I recommended was to go along with the rebanding and see what happens. Many of the problems with this system result from interference from Nextel. If anyone would like to see this paper (which I did pretty well on), feel free to e-mail or PM me and I'll send it to you.
 
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