GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY: Emergency Responders Need Equipment Compatibility, DHS Official Says

The question from the 1984 Ghostbusters film -- "Who ya gonna call?" -- is a loaded one around here. One of my jobs as the director of the Command, Control and Interoperability Division at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Directorate for Science and Technology is to ensure that our heroes -- emergency responders -- can talk to one another. The buzzword is interoperability. I hear it daily, and there's no question it's critically important.

FEDERAL COMPUTER WEEK: DHS plans enhanced interoperability standard

The Homeland Security Department expects to complete an enhanced version of its Bridging Systems Interface technical standard in the this summer to better enable interoperability among emergency response agencies, a senior official said at the GovSec conference today.

The enhanced standard will allow for better connections between systems that link disparate radio systems, said Luke Berndt, chief technical officer for DHS' Office of Interoperability and Compatibility. It also will provide for better linkages with different types of first responder radio systems.

GT EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT: Orange County, Calif., May Be Successful Model for Interoperable Communications Systems

The assertion that all responders from cities within one county should share an interoperable communications system really isn't debatable in the United States. The delays caused by a lack of interoperable communications between fire and police at the World Trade Center on 9/11 are common knowledge. But many counties still struggle to persuade first responder agencies in cities to agree on uniform system specs.

Their concerns are serious. In 2003, the National Task Force on Interoperability outlined five obstacles to achieving county interoperability. The task force blamed:

• aging and incompatible equipment;
• fragmented budget cycles;
• limited and fragmented planning and coordination;
• limited and fragmented spectrum; and
• agency resistance to uniform equipment standards.

However, four years before that report, Orange County, Calif., managed to connect all of its responders in 31 cities on the same 800 MHz trunk radio system. The system supports more than 17,000 radios and averages about 55,000 transmissions daily. The trunk system uses 81 channels and has nearly 400 talkgroups.

GT EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT: California Demonstrates Interoperability of Damage Assessment Data

A large-scale natural or man-made disaster in California would put tremendous stress and extreme demands on the ability of governments and their building code agencies throughout the affected region to respond to and recover from such an event.

That stress and could be greatly reduced with mobile safety/damage assessment technology, according to a report released Dec. 14, 2008, by a partnership between the Alliance for Building Regulatory Reform in the Digital Age, the California Office of Emergency Services (OES) and the California Office of Homeland Security.

The report highlighted the successful demonstration during the Golden Guardian "Great ShakeOut" exercise in November 2008 in the Los Angeles Basin. The demonstration showed that building departments can transfer damage assessments quickly using mobile field inspection technology. The technology eliminates the need to spend hours transposing assessment report data onto federal disaster forms.

SL TODAY: Gov. Nixon halts $80 million emergency worker radio system

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) -- A more than $80 million project to improve the radio system used by Missouri police, firefighters and other emergency responders has been put on hold by Gov. Jay Nixon.

The contract had been awarded to Motorola Inc. shortly before Gov. Matt Blunt left office Jan. 12. But Nixon's administration quickly put it on hold, leading to the resignation of the project manager and prompting Blunt's former public safety director to raise concerns.

URGENT COMMUNICATIONS: Manufacturers successfully test P25 trunking interoperability

Five radio manufacturers—Motorola, Tait Radio Communications, Tyco Electronics M/A-COM, EFJohnson Technologies, and Technisonic Industries—successfully conducted interoperability tests this week using the Project 25 Phase 1 trunking common air interface. The tests were conducted at Motorola’s Schaumburg, Ill., headquarters.

BROADBAND CENSUS: FCC Chairman Kevin Martin Resigns, Expresses Regret About Public Safety Communications

WASHINGTON, January 15, 2009 - Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin on Thursday resigned from his position, effective Inauguration Day.

Of all the issues that took place during his chairmanship, from March 2005 until next week, Martin expressed the strongest regret about the lack of interoperable communications networks for public safety officials.

AFCEA: Joint Experiment Bridges Interoperability Gap

Multinational effort focuses on information sharing between civilian and military agencies.

Network-centric data transfer capabilities are swiftly moving from the battlefield into areas such as national emergency response and homeland security. A recent joint exercise between NATO and Sweden demonstrated how coalition nations and local civilian authorities can link their networks together to share information in real time.

The goal of the Joint Live Experiment on Network Enabled Capabilities, held in September 2008 in Enkoping, Sweden, was to validate solutions for future coalition operations with live data exchanges between Sweden and NATO. The experiment also demonstrated Sweden’s Network Based Defense (NBD) and NATO’s Network Enabled Capabilities (NNEC) concepts.