Will Police Radios and Smartphones Merge?

[digitalanalog]

Someday very soon, your smartphone and your police radio may merge into the most powerful communications tool in public safety history.

The Story:
Will Police Radios and Smartphones Merge? - Article - POLICE Magazine

did a search and did not find this story, so here it is

 

[wkredick]

If they do merge I would hope they consider battery life on the unit.Maybe have some of those Alkaline Battery kit like you can attach to some LMR portables now in place of the original battery.Forgot the nickname for the things.

 

[mmckenna]

Issue with this is that when you put all your communications resources in one box with one battery, you are limiting your redundancy.

There is a Chinese company that is already making a GSM phone with a VHF radio inside. I played with it at IWCE this year. Interesting idea, but it made neither a good cell phone or a good 2 way radio.

Likely things will improve in the years to come, and the issues will be worked out. Most officers are already carrying cell phones and a 2 way radio, so this makes good sense. When 700MHz and LTE mature, this will make sense, for agencies that do everything on 700MHz, but that won't be the case for most rural or smaller agencies.

 

[SuperPhly]

As a part of a larger project that incorporates smartphones for law enforcement use, I've done some experiments with interfacing a professional site into an android app over IP, and honestly it worked pretty well. The problem always comes down to practical field use. You can drop a radio a typical police radio a hundred times and it will keep kicking for years, plus with less moving parts you have less that can go wrong. Could the right phone entirely replace a handheld radio? Probably, but it doesn't exist right now and even if it did, those types want a tech that they can call in to smack over the head when their radio site goes down. They wouldn't get that with a commercial cell phone provider.

 

[mm]

As another member mentioned the 'All of the eggs in one basket' idea is my biggest complaint also.

700/800 MHz and everything above this frequency range flat out does not work up here in the pacific Northwest, what with all of the 100+ feet trees in this geographic location but of course our wonderful technologically retarded Government who comes up with these PUT ALL THE EGGS In ONE BASKET ideas don't care a rats rear about us up here in the Northwest.

This is obvious what with FEMA kissing away and pissing on the flood victims of Oregon this week, well it's obvious where the governments priorities are and it's not in doing anything rational.

Let them build there 700/800 MHz/cellular public safety network in some flat location without 100 dB of vegetation attenuation and let them go ahead and try to auction off any and all frequencies that they can get their greedy little hands one without doing any sensible engineering evaluations.


In most areas of this country the locals know what works and what doesn't work much better than the morons in our government do and this is just another idea to bankrupt us and give needless contracts to big corporations.

I'm sure that once again all of the big public safety vendors will each design their own proprietary public safety LTE systems that are incompatible with one another, which will stop working when the wind starts blowing.

I can just see it now Harris will have Open Sky LTE, or maybe even resurrect EDACS LTE while Motorola will have Smartnet LTE and EF Johnson will be left in the corner with some rehashed version of LTR LTE with all of them needing another vendors interop bridge just to talk to one another.

Ok off my rant now,

 

[SuperPhly]

I can just see it now Harris will have Open Sky LTE, or maybe even resurrect EDACS LTE while Motorola will have Smartnet LTE and EF Johnson will be left in the corner with some rehashed version of LTR LTE with all of them needing another vendors interop bridge just to talk to one another.

Ok off my rant now,

Yeah, I didn't even think about it like that, but you're right. Even if the infinitely cheaper option were available to use a commercial service for some sort of hybrid, you'd still be stuck under the thumb of all of these companies piping out their incompatible systems at ridiculous monopolistic prices and reminding everyone that the next time Katrina happens you won't have cell phone towers.

So far as using the wrong technology for a region, that seems to be "how it goes", thanks to upper management loving how buttered up they are by the salesme... um, I mean radio communication experts, that come out to talk to them from whichever vendor cuts to the front of the line. It only gets fixed after the guys in the field come storming back a half dozen times with a bag full of parts that used to be handhelds.

 

[pickles37]

Motorola launched a kind of phone/LTE radio hybrid at IWCE - the LEX 700 LEX 700 Mission Critical Handheld - Motorola Solutions USA