US Sets Up Emergency Multi-Band Radio Project

coondoggie writes "Looking to help eliminate the dangerous and inefficient hodgepodge of communication and network technology used by emergency response personnel, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today said it had picked 14 groups from across the country to pilot an ambitious Multi-Band Radio project. In 2008, the DHS Science and Technology Directorate awarded a $6.2 million contract to Thales Communications to demonstrate the first-ever portable radio prototype that lets emergency responders — police, firefighters, emergency medical personnel and others — communicate with partner agencies, regardless of the radio band they operate on."

Comments

Waiste Money on what has allready been done

[pcjunky]

Why don't they ask the group who has been using multiband equipment for several decades. Amateur Radio operators. They have radios that operate from below 1 MHz to over 1GHz. They have been doing (without pay) emergency radio communications for a very long time now.

Oh god, no!!!

[girlintraining]

The Department of Homeland Security only gives the kiss of death to public works projects. Here's what's going to happen; A bunch of committees will be called, and they're going to make a whole bunch of suggestions about what it "should" do. Each organization will want to have at least one feature included, a vote, etc. Tens (possibly hundreds) of millions will be lost doing this. It'll be filed under "R&D costs". At least a third of those suggestions will be crap or impossible/unfeasible to implement. It'll be recycled a few times on the General Schedule before some hapless corporation wins the contract. Then all hell breaks loose as delays in the project force reductions in scope, and the process of defining "core features" begins. By this point, everyone will be pointing fingers, and it'll be half-implemented and broken in many places. The project's surviving assets will be quietly transferred after a GAO inquiry regarding cost overruns and lack of deliverables -- just ahead of a congressional committee being called on the matter. Two years later, someone gets the idea that the US should have a multi-band radio project...

I only say this, because they've tried it with different scopes over and over and over and over again. Their technology department is understaffed due to high turnover and leadership problems.

Fundamentally, these things never leave the pilot phase, or if they do, they face deployment problems because the requirements are so obtuse and ambitious that existing technology can't adapt. Even if it can, bureaucratic problems usually end a project before it sees wide-scale deployment due to reluctance to adopt new technology and failures in leadership -- namely, not communicating with people in the field before trying to put something there.