"Michael Coslo" wrote


Are the emergency organizations going to employ pay and train competent radio
operators who are capable of figuring out where they need to be frequency
wise?

"First responders" are not radio operators. They are firemen, policemen,
medical personel, ambulance drivers, etc., etc., etc. To these people a radio
is just another tool --- they need to just "mash the PTT" like you describe, and
communicate their message.

THIS IS EXACTLY AS IT SHOULD BE! Communications should be transparent to these
people, and require no training at all beyond simple circuit procedures.

The failures of communications in New Orleans were not because of lack of
spectrum, nor lack of "competent radio operators", but lack of properly hardened
communications facilities, and lack of backup for those facilities.

Prime example --- the New Orleans PD EDACS MA/Comm 800 MHz radio system
functioned well during and immediately after the hurricane, but then natural gas
service to the prime downtown transmitter site was disrupted and the generator
was out. (No gas, no generator. No generator, no transmitter.) Owners of the
site would not allow installation of LP gas tanks as a backup to piped gas,
meaning generators did not have any fuel when the main lines were cut.

Further compounding the situation was the fact that the PD EDACS acted as a hub
of the area Inter-Operation system with 17 hard-patched RF links to a variety of
other agencies in NO and nearby cities/parishes. When the EDACS went down, it
pulled all those inter-op links down with it and the whole first-responder comm
system imploded, reduced to little "islands" of communications that couldn't
inter-communicate. Airlifting a thousand "competent radio operators" into the
area would not have improved communications at the level of the "feet on the
street" cop, fireman, or medical person one iota.

As I see it, two mundane planning changes could have prevented this train
wreck....

1) Emergency fuel supplies at the transmitter site (a 2,000 pound tank of
LP lasts weeks).
2) A star or mesh (rather than a hub) topology of the mutual-aid/other
interop links which didn't allow a single point of failure to crash the whole
system.

73, de Hans, K0HB