Tuesday Glitch for Philadelphia's Police Radio System

[Audiodave1]

by KYW's Michelle Durham

Philadelphia police radios in some sections of the city went dead for about 15 minutes on Tuesday morning.

It's just the latest episode in the checkered performance history of the digital system.

KYW Newsradio 1060 Philadelphia - Another Glitch For Philadelphia's Police Radio Dispatch System

 

[K8TEK]

I'm interested in knowing how their radios switched to an "alternate band". Typical stupid reporters.

 

[RADIOGUY2002]

I think we should use a

I think we should use a Crime plotting map for all the prolbems this systems has. Its amazing it has not cause more havoc. But then again what is to much?

 

[jcardani]

The Alternate band was J-band. Police radios in the 1st and 17th districts switched over to J-band during the outage. I was listening at the time. Radios were getting an "out of range message" on their district talkgroup (South band) - which is on the B system.

The police use system B for police and system A for fire, airport, municipal, etc. Police J-band, M-band, and T-band can operate on both systems A and B. Both A and B systems overlap the city 100 percent. This is done for redundancy.

The problem was in the controller of the Grays Ferry site on System B so when they switched to J-band, they operated on system A. Motorola techs fixed the problem in about 30 mins.