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First Responder Networks 5 Years After 9/11
stinkymountain writes, "Five years after 9/11, you'd think all of the nation's first responders would be on a state-of-the-art wireless network that would enable police, fire and other emergency personnel to talk to each other in case of a disaster. But they're not -- yet. Network World ran an investigative piece sketching why progress has been so slow, and describing the progress that has been made." The article leads off with a scenario that represents the toughest possible test for a first-responder network. Even the best imaginable networked system might bog down in the midst of "fog of war" situations.
Probably the biggest single reason is the lack of available spectrum needed to support broadband wireless devices for public-safety radios.
That is finally about to change. The FCC has mandated that TV stations give up the 700MHz channels and that bandwidth be available for broadband public safety applications. Unfortunately, that switch wont occur until February 2009.
Link to printable version : http://www.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi?p agetosend=/export/home/httpd/htdocs/research/2006/ 090406-sept11-first-responders.html
It appears the article failed to look at all 50 states and only take tidbits from different areas that have an issue. It states that DC is #1 in the nation for preparedness; however, if you check it would be the State of Ohio.
After multiple years (starting well before 9/11) and Millions of Public Dollars, Ohio offically rolled out MARCS (Multi Agency Radio Communication System)in 2004-05. The system has towers in all 88 Ohio counties and bosts coverage of 98% of the state (some of the terrain in Southeastern Ohio prevents total coverage). MARCS has enabled all agencies, whether it be the State Highway Patrol, EMA, County Sherriff's, City Police, and other responders, to communicate with each other without restrictions.
MARCS has also been studied by other states that are in the process of implementing their own first responders network. The article would have been better if it looked at all 50 states because while those mentioned might not be ready, I am sure there are others Like Ohio that have deployed or in the proccess of deploying multi-agency networks.
The communication problerm, on 9/11 was too simple ..
A device called a repeater is a radio receiver and transmitter that re-transmit the low power walkie talkies from a high location, with much higher power giving these hand held transceivers much increased range both in terms of receive and transmit distance .
This so called failure was no failure at all
Its a political Football for one simple reason
Many of the the repeater(s) that provided these communications were on the trade center itself !
Nothing else need be said,
No matter how well it worked, It cant work if it is gone
Poleticans can care less about how it works. And why it cant
Another problem is that in many cases, those who make the decisions on what to buy have no experience in using the equipment. They believe whatever the sales reps tell them and the end users get stuck with equipment that works poorly while getting told that there is nothting wrong with it. Public Safety personell are cursed with equipment that does not work as well as the equipment they used to use.
I know this because I work in public safety and we have this problem. 800 Mhz systems are being pushed heavily right now, yet nobody thinks of the problems. Sales reps gloss over problems, saying that these systems will work so much better than the VHF systems they are replacing. But these new radio systems work in the same general frequency range as the cell phones everybody has. How many times are your calls dropped because you drove into a valley or walked into a building? How would you like to be an officer searching for an armed suspect when that happens? I have had that happen, and trust me, it is not a good feeling when it does.
The sales reps will say you don't need any extra tower sites for the new system, what you have will be more than enough. But for decent coverage in the UHF band you need your antennas on the high ground so you can cover the low areas of your coverage area and you need a lot of them. Cell phone companies understand this and put their towers on the high ground near areas of heavy usage. Unfortunately, public safety does not get anywhere near as many, and those that they do have are often set up where they already have land, such as the back yard of fire stations. These are frequently not in the best location geographically for radio coverage, and money is not spent on obtaining decent transmitter locations.
Sales reps don't care about this. All they care about are sales. They know that once the sale is made, they are out of there and it is no longer their problem, but the buyer's. Sounds a lot like the IT field, doesn't it?
There are 4 types of liars (in order):
4. Liars
3. Pathalogical Liars
2. Car Salesmen
1. Sales Reps
So remember the Dispatchers saying, "Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts."
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
What I've wondered is if they can't set up a system to prioritize calls through the cell phone system during an emergency, to allow first responders to communicate
They already do that, at least for GSM equipment, not sure about the US stuff.
During the london underground bombings they turned off public access to the cells around aldgate.
...we have an old VHF system. The city fire department, police department and sheriff office in our area are all on digital 800 Mhz systems. In order to upgrade the county fire departments, there would have to be enough money to upgrade handheld radios of over 250 firefighters at about $800 a piece. Not to mention to repeaters and such that some departments have. Don't forget the personally owned radios that the firefighters have in their vehicles, too. Of the five volunteer departments in the county, with about 50 certified firefighters (they test and train just like the paid firefighters), new radios could break any budget unless federal grant money comes in.
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I have some idea of how to build and maintain distributed RF networks. They way you phrased your question seems to indicate that you do not. I get the thought that you and others have this model in your head where Radio systems are all some magic digital mesh network. They are not. Many of them are using 15 year old technology or older. To create the kind of emergency network communications system that we all think should already be in place would require a basic replacement of much of the current communications systems.
There are several basic reasons for this: 1-There is old technology still in use. 2-Current systems were paid for piece-meal, by one department or another and not purchased, planned, or configured for wide dispersion communications cooperatives. That is to say that the fire dept. buys their gear, the police buy their own gear too, and someone has the unfortunate job of trying to make the two systems match up at some level, usually not a great matchup. 3-Financing means that the updates to even the most coordinated of communications systems happens in fits and starts. So, while the police get new comms gear, its 5+ years before the fire dept. catches up, but then their gear is much better, or supercedes the old police system. Hospitals get upgrades even less frequently! Now, add to this the need for additional comms channels to FEMA, Army, National Guard, Coast Guard, municipal utilities, power utility, gas, water, etc. etc. The chances of getting all those systems on the same page is a bigger problem than just getting FEMA to take appropriate actions.
After 911, there were multiple deptartments, cities, and services involved. After Katrina/Rita, there were multiple states involved, and their multiple comms systems.
The only sure way is a huge forklift style upgrade of just about everyone's comms systems. BTW, adding geographical redundancy is a huge cost to all those groups, so get ready mr. and mrs. taxpayer... its a huge cost.
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CB at 27MHZ with AM modulation?
Wrong frequency and wrong modulation method.
You want something that will surive multpath reflections without a lot of degeneration - that says over 100-200 MHz.
You want somthing that can sort out the signal and work with it after it has reflected off of a bunch of things and is getting received. If it is voice alone, then something like FM would work.
But then I just described a lot of the police radios already out there.
If you want it to be digital, then you need a multipath resilent modulation scheme. OFDM is where you go to do that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COFDM
Above is a good overview.
Ideally, you want the capability for group communication, selective communication, and knowing the location of all the radio units at the control base station.
In a perfect world - Let's add the capability for everyone to communicate with the base station getting wiped out and no transponder/repeater dependency in a pinch. Barring those, lots of redundancy in the system, so if one gets wiped out, then another can take over.
If you are not aware of it, that has been around for for disaster communication for quite a while:
http://www.arrl.org/pio/emergen1.html
The distributed nature of the above, and all the redundancy of the multiple sources make it work, albeit not perfectly. Hm.... sounds like a terrorist network doesn't it?
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
The article didn't mention TETRA, which is an existing technology for first responder networks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Trunked_R adio.
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Back when I was an EMT for an ambulance company, we had 4 banks of radios we listened to. UHF, VHF, digital, and another portable digital. We talked to our dispatch ceneter on VHF, town A's fire dept on UHF, town A's police dept on digital, Town B's fire dept on VHF, Town B's police on portable digital, and then a few other agencies mixed in there as well. It was confusing at first learning which radio to talk to depending on which town's district and what type of a call you were on.
The fire dept I'm on now has been fiddling with trying to get a radio system down. They've gone from analog to digital back to analog, and now digital again. Some people say the digital signal isn't as strong as the analog. Our digital radios don't talk to our police dept. at all. The PD recently went to digital radios, but we still can't talk to them. We have to relay everything through dispatch. As an example, we were on SWAT standby a few nights ago. We staged out and saw a police officer waving his light at us, so we drove on in. As we came in, they yelled at us to get out of there because the scene wasn't safe yet. So we staged again around the corner. Break down in communications? I'd say so.
We also have Toughbook laptops and GSP tracking on all of our rigs. If the system worked reliably, it would be great. Supposedly the GPS coordinates are relayed to the dispatch computers for each call to determine who is closest. Info on each call from dispatch can be seen in the rig as it is entered in the comm center as well as real time mapping to map us into a call. Fairly often the system doesn't update fast enough or crashes and the officer has to pull out the run books to map us into the call. Not that using the old books is bad, but having to make the switch enroute to a call ain't good.
There are channels that have been set aside for interagency operations. They are labeled based on which side of the metro area the call is in. I know the fire protection district next to ours has only in the last few months gotten radios that will let them talk in that new system.
Money is a big issue. Not everyone can afford to get digital radios and antennas throughout their districts. It would be nice if everyone was on the same page. What happens for example when one of the districts that still uses analog radios responds for mutual aid to a district that is covered with digital radios?
As long as the govt has their hands in it, the problem will never get solved.
FF/EMT
Colorado
I'm an officer in a fire department. A much smaller department of course -- but we all study the same issues and see the same FEMA, NFPA, etc. bulletins.
The problems at the trade center were not so easily blamed on radios. Katrina related issues in New Orleans however, were influenced a great deal by radio communication problems.
That said, here are some things to consider:
1. Most departments are NOT like FDNY. 86% of firefighters in the USA are "on-call" not live in full timers. 96% of departments in the USA are staffed in part or in whole by on-call firefighters, and 40% of the population is protected by these "volunteers". Focusing on FDNY and their issues on 9/11 isn't doing a service to the real problem.
2. With Katrina, every cell tower, every radio repeater, and all the power for thousands of square miles was down. Trucks with portable backup repeaters couldn't operate in the deep water and muck. With no communication, fire crews are acting as islands and cut off from knowing where emergencies are or from getting help. Police had the same problem, but the added issue of a populace which would rather fight them then help them.
Now, taking that knowledge in hand, let's talk about what has happened since 9/11 in my little department. Since 9/11 here's what's changed:
1. Every member of my department has their own radio at all times. This is unusual for rural departments - or was. These radios are not cheap. They run about $1500 each. Remember, not just any radio will do -- they must be "intrinsically safe" (meaning no internal sparks) and must stand up to some fairly serious abuse.
2. Every member of my department (and most in other departments I've spoken to) has complete the now required "NIMS" (National Incident Management System) training and certification process at levels 100 and 700. Most town leaders have also completed this training. Officers such as myself also complete NIMS 300, while chiefs complete several more. This system is set up so that in an escallating emergency all responders are on the same page from a language, radio traffic, procurement, authorization, authority, and responsibility perspective as an incident grows from a single unit response to a multi-state task force. The system is patterned after a very successful program used for years by the forest service.
3. Although most towns still use their own frequencies on their radios, in our area all the towns which are adjacent and most which are one town removed are pre-programmed on our radios. There is also a statewide non-repeated frequency so that any firefighter on the fireground has a way to communicate.
4. I am told, though I have not seen, that for very large incidents equipment exists that allows high level incident management teams from the federal level to respond and "slot in" a radio from each local jurisdiction. This device acts as a switch of some kind, bridging the radio systems on the fly. I'm told a decision on how far down the chain that technology will be pushed is still in the works.
5. Even in our little town of under 10,000; we've gotten together with nearby towns and drilled at mass casualty and hazardous materials incidents.
Now, if you think there are more things we should do, consider that most "volunteers" (remember, that's 86% of firefighters) put in more than 50 hours a year of unpaid training time as it is. Where were you?
The people who understand the failings in the 911 response but are not part of the chain of command are other firefighters. All of us, around the country, can point to things the FDNY did wrong. It's easy to do after the fact. We're also the most reluctant to do so. Our brothers may have made mistakes, but they did a lot of things right in the face of terrible danger and stress. We're reluctant to point fingers. That doesn't mean we don't discuss it among ourselves and in our training.
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First of all, most of those design criteria are only relevant for maybe 1% of real-world situations. Optimize for the 99% case and have a handful of units on standby for the extreme cases. Second, I'd bet your average cell phone has better life expectancy under adverse conditions than most of those police radios. Why? Because they are mass-manufactured and have to be able to survive the abuse of teenagers and have a low enough failure rate that the manufacturer won't get dumped by the cell provider. Seriously.
Second, you're right about dead spots. On the flip side, that's an issue no matter what communication mechanism you use. The laws of physics come into play. Increase the transmitter power and you increase interference between devices and create a channel clutter problem that is just as problematic as dead spots if not more so. It is a trade-off
Third, only the servers that manage inter-unit communication need to be centralized, and you can still have more than one of them, located in separate locations, on separate networks. That way no matter how the regional network splits, there will always be one on the right side of the split... if you do the wiring right, of course. And with multiple backbones between the servers that are geographically isolated, you can make the split effectively go away. Since that sort of equipment could be stuck in a half dozen wire closets around the city (telephone company pedestals, etc.), it is nothing at all like the situation in 9/11 where the equipment all ends up in the basement of ground zero....
Finally, security isn't as hard as you might think. Your protocol should include crypto anyway. The worst case problem would be some terrorist flooding an AP with noise to disrupt the data communication, but that is just as easy no matter what technology. At least with a distributed mesh of nodes forwarding traffic for each other, you could conceivably handle such a case (within reasonable limits).
Really, 802.11s would be a good place to begin rather than a, b, or g, but....
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Being well Trained in emcomm and having some inkling of military strategy, I must state that any communications requiring infrastructure is at serious risk of failure or attack. Also, newer technologies are at higher risk of failure due to their complexity. These are facts which are demonstrated in every serious disaster. The only thing for sure is that point to point communications that use no infrastructure can be established.
My own county and city's 800 MHz system failed only a few months ago in a minor weather disaster, one with no injuries and relatively little minor damage due to some F0-F1 tornadoes and high winds which uprooted trees. The sheriff's dept, police dept, public works, all except the fire department which had kept their 150mhz radios as a backup, were down, evidently due to a single point failure of a minor power outage at the tower with a failure of the backup generator. Since I was at the emergency operations center at the time, I was aware of the situation. My comment to the county EM was that such equipment wasn't supposed to fail until there was actually a real emergency.
In order to be cost effective, communications systems must be designed to minimize costs while performing adaquately during the 99% of the time where only normal communications are occuring. During an emergency, equipment is failing, people are missing (evacuating, taking care of family, stranded, or perhaps worse), and the need for additional communications capability is rising exponentially, overloading everything still available. Note that the differences between 911, Katrina, Rita, forest fires and earthquakes are essentially extent of damaged area, severity of damage and the duration of the disaster.
During such emergencies, skilled communicators become a very rare commodity. It requires skill and training to accurately convey information under emergency conditions. These are things that many first responders do not even have unless specifically trained with ongoing practice.
Another factor that becomes a problem is that unused equipment tends to develop problems. Batteries run down, connectors go flakey, capacitors deteriorate. Stockpiling equipment is unlikely to solve the problems, especially without the trained personel to man the equipment. Stockpiling sufficient quantites of trained employees would be so expensive as to bankrupt the whole society.
Newer technology is valuable only when it provides benefit, something beyond putting the salesman's kids through college. Virtually all things offer advantages and disadvantages under certain circumstances and seldom does one find only advantages. Older technology doesn't mean it is obsolete or even inferior in every circumstance.
For example, cell phones are just radios that are easy to use, if you've got a good cellphone system and plenty of money to waste on minutes. They are extremely low power and very small and portable. In serious emergencies situations, where most or all of the cell phone infrastructure is gone and there is no power to recharge their batteries, these modern creations are totally useless whereas a world war II antique army walkie talkie would actually be usable.
If you thought 911 was a disaster, just wait until the terrorists decide to do an orchestrated attack against New York City's water and sewage treatment facilities.