Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Wireless revolution

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Dec 2002 17:59:18 -0500

Wireless revolution

December 9, 2002 1:34pm

Picture a perfect world — well, not perfect exactly; let's say there's enough imperfection
around to cause
fires. But that single flaw aside, imagine a world where all of the firefighters arriving
at an incident could talk
loudly and clearly to each other.

Even deep in the fireground, firefighters who
can't see two feet ahead could know exactly
what's supposed to be in the building through
heads-up visor displays that show a
computer-generated image of every floor. Plus,
all the apparatus arrive in time to fight the fire
effectively, because each vehicle has in it an
accurate digital map that was sent from the
communications center to a ruggedized laptop.

As we used to say to our parents on long car
trips, are we there yet? Well, no. Should we
even be headed there? Or are there some other
places we should head first?

Advances from adversity

Last year's terrorist attacks gave a boost to the
visibility of wireless communications in
general, and to fireground communications in particular. Federal grants are available to
state and local
governments to improve their communications systems, and new wireless applications have
been
announced by some unlikely developers.

Consider, for instance, the “tooth phone,” under development by Barry Mersky, a dentist
from Bethesda,
Md. The phone is a two-way wireless communications device fitted to a dental retainer.
Earlier this year,
Mersky showed his invention to the Homeland Security and Defense Symposium in Atlantic
City, N.J.
Mersky hopes to market his invention to first responders who work in high-noise
environments. Reportedly,
the device converts vibrations of the teeth into voice signals that can be heard in the
100dB range. Mersky
told reporters the device would probably cost $200 per unit.

The same trade show featured the First Responder, a modified Chevy Suburban SUV capable of
assuring
interoperability between fire, police and emergency medical services at an emergency
scene. Raytheon
developed the vehicle, which reportedly sells for $225,000.

“There's a lot of really cool technology out there,” says Billy Goldfeder, a battalion
chief in the
Loveland-Symmes (Ohio) Fire Department near Cincinnati. “But a lot of it doesn't really
work very well.”

Goldfeder's fireground communications sights are set a bit lower than issuing firefighters
tooth phones or
SUV-based communications centers. He just wants to be able to talk to his firefighters at
the fireground,
clearly and reliably, every time. His pet peeve is with people who purchase communications
systems for fire
departments and then deploy them without testing them fully.

Personally, Goldfeder leans toward old-fashioned, analog communications systems that work
all the time.
He is skeptical about digital technology, and most of the new wireless communications
products are digital.
“I'm told it's a work in progress,” he says. “Work in progress? Why the hell are you
giving me a work in
progress? We're firefighters.”

For Goldfeder, voice is the key application, and it has to work every time. Firefighters
expect rigs to start
every time there's a fire, Goldfeder reasons. Why expect less from wireless communications
equipment?

Goldfeder's own department has Nextel wireless phones for “command conversations,” plus
800MHZ digital
portable radios “that work fairly well,” backed up with 154MHZ analog radios. “We can
switch between
analog and digital,” Goldfeder says. “But when do you do it?”

Worst-case scenario

Goldfeder's bad dream runs like this: Firefighters arrive on scene with their radios in
digital mode, able to
communicate with each other and their dispatcher. However, as they set to work, they find
themselves
fading out on each other, and their incident commander instructs them to switch to analog
mode. The
dispatcher, still digital, is now out of the loop, but the firefighters can speak clearly
to each other. All goes
well as long as … well, as long as all goes well.

At this point the firefighters can talk to each other, but they can't always see each
other. In some smoky
corner of the burning building, a firefighter finds himself in real trouble and doesn't
have time to say, “Hey,
I'm in trouble! Help!” He also isn't entirely sure where he is, and neither his comrades
nor his commander
are sure, either. He hits the panic button on his radio, but because he's in analog mode
and the button is
digital, no one hears him.

If he has the presence of mind to return to digital mode, the dispatcher may hear him. But
how will the
dispatcher get in touch with the firefighters at the scene, who are still in analog mode?
The endangered
firefighter may be left to rely on the strength of his own voice, calling for help in what
Raytheon would call a
“high-noise environment.”

“I've heard that exact scenario,” says John Anderson, senior safety manager for public
safety and major
accounts at Kenwood Communications Corp., in Newberry Park, Calif., a major supplier of
wireless
communications equipment to fire departments.

“There are solutions to that problem,” Anderson says, noting that the problem is not
between analog and
digital technology, but with the proper installation of the system backing up a
department's portable radios.

“If the radio system is not reliable, the solution is a mobile repeater in the fire truck,
close to the building,”
Anderson says. “[Firefighters] can communicate with the truck and then out to the dispatch
center reliably.”

Cool, but at a cost

Stephen Adler of Motorola says that plenty of new technology, including the heads-up
displays referred to
earlier, is commercially available, but that the fire service has not kept pace with the
emergency medical
service in deploying it.

“There was a lot of money available in federal grants, beginning in the 1970s and running
into the early
1980s, and the medical side took full advantage of it,” he says. “The fire service lagged
a bit behind, at least
in this country.”

Steven Foley, senior fire service safety specialist at the National Fire Protection
Association, in Quincy,
Mass., thinks Adler overestimates the technological gap between the fire and emergency
medical services,
pointing out that, in most large American cities, the two services are part of the same
bureaucracy and
often use the same communications equipment and network.

However, Foley concedes that fire departments in the United States are behind European
countries. For
example, that same heads-up display technology is available and in use in many parts of
Europe.

“My friends in the Strathclyde Fire Brigade in Scotland have that capacity now in their
apparatus, and it
gives them a complete picture of the building,” Foley says. “A lot of that is available
from the building
department.”

The technology may be available, but there still are technical barriers to its deployment.
For example,
mapping information can be downloaded to a laptop in the responding vehicle to help
firefighters locate the
right address or to a firefighter's heads-up display to help him find his way around the
building.

Speed and cost are at issue, however. The fact that the data exists on paper or in a
computer database
doesn't mean that making it available will be easy, or cheap.

“The technology is there, but the speed of moving the data is rather slow,” says Denny
Blaine, executive
vice president of sales and marketing at E.F. Johnson & Co., based in Waseca, Minn. “We're
trying to push
all the data out to a fire apparatus, but trying to push all that down to the apparatus
might take as long as
getting to the fire itself.

“It's also costly. You need receiving equipment, screens and so on, to boost the data.
It's costly for them
(fire departments) to upgrade their equipment. The other thing is, sometimes building
mapping is a fairly
new technology, and not all commercial buildings would be mapped in an area.”

Fiefdom borders

When Foley goes out to a Strathclyde pub for a pint with the lads, they have trouble
believing that, in the
United States, the firefighters can't always talk to the police, or the neighboring
department, or even to each
other. But Foley has no trouble believing it. That's there, he explains, and this is here.

“The United Kingdom fire service is pretty regimented, and it's a national system,” he
says. “They have
national standards, and there's no deviation. Here in the States, people go out and do
what they want
without thinking about the big picture. Doing things with your neighboring fire
department, well, you should
be able to talk to them. It's not a technical issue; it's a fiefdom issue.”

There are jurisdictional issues that tug wireless communications back and forth across
state and county
lines, and across bureaucratic boundaries as well. A report compiled for New York City by
management
consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and published over the summer revealed that New York's fire
and police
departments couldn't always talk to each other at incidents.

In addition, the report pointed out that only about 10% of New York City's 2,000 high-rise
buildings
(buildings more than seven stories high) were equipped with repeaters to aid radio signals
up and down the
building. The World Trade Center towers, completed in the mid-1970s, were not among them.

The terrorist attacks of last September have made it easier to see the big picture, but
there has been an
effort under way for years to encourage a unified national standard for emergency services
communication
called Project 25.

Project 25, the international joint effort of the mobile communications industry and
public safety officials to
set interoperability standards, has received a boost in public visibility during the past
year. Since 1989, it
has provided the arena in which technical arguments have been thrashed out, and its
executive director,
Craig Jorgensen, has predicted that its standards may be ready in 2004.

Like all communications standards efforts, Project 25 suffers from its sheer size and from
the scope and
complexity of its work. Its goal is to “promote the design, manufacture, the evolution and
the universal and
effective use of technologies stemming from the APCO/NAST/FED Project 25 process.” All
three major
mobile and portable radio vendors — Kenwood, Motorola and E.F. Johnson — and many smaller
vendors,
are involved in the process. But some are more enthusiastic than others. After all, what
happens to a
manufacturer that commits to build Project 25 equipment and networks if the standard
becomes outdated?

Nonetheless, Motorola offers an entire set of wireless network equipment for emergency
services, and all of
the units are compatible with Project 25. And IBM recently announced its intention to
build a public safety
wireless data network that will allow more than 40 local, state and federal agencies in
the Washington,
D.C., area to communicate via real-time messaging.

Planning issues

Goldfeder says it's a good idea to be interoperable with other agencies and neighboring
departments, but he
doesn't think such a goal is as easily attainable in the United States as it was,
apparently, in Europe. He's
not sure that national standards would be a panacea, either.

“We're the United States, and that doesn't make us great or wonderful or better or worse,
but by our nature,
we're independent,” he says. “European governments are much more into central purchasing,
much more
consolidated. I would say that bigger is not necessarily better, and consolidation can
lead to large
bureaucracy.”

NFPA's Foley points out that interoperable does not necessarily mean transparent. “A lot
of people talk
about interoperability, but I can tell you that the FBI or the Secret Service doesn't want
Joe Firefighter on
their encrypted radio,” Foley says.

Goldfeder thinks that wireless communications fail on the fireground because the people
responsible for
purchasing the equipment pay too much attention to the technology or a seemingly
attractive price for the
equipment, and not enough attention to simple, common-sense things like testing. “Just
crummy planning
on the part of the people who build the systems,” he says.

Surprisingly, at least one vendor agrees with Goldfeder. An executive with a major vendor,
who asked that
neither he nor his firm be identified, says that having firefighters switch back and forth
between digital and
analog modes is a bad idea; a network, he says, should be one thing or the other.

“There is a direct system, or radio to radio, and a wide-area system, which is repeaters
on hilltops and
buildings,” the executive says. “Imagine a fireman inside a building transmitting out 50
yards to the truck or
to other firemen in the building. That's direct. The breakdown we're describing is a
fireman trying to transmit
on the wide-area system, trying to hit a repeater on a hilltop 20 miles away.”

The answer, the executive says, is to consider the system as a whole, to build more
repeaters closer
together and to train firefighters thoroughly in the use of their equipment. With a well —
thought-out mix of
repeaters (including mobile ones) and rugged radios, firefighters wouldn't have to
remember which mode
they were in.

Of megahertz and moolah

There are two resources whose availability may have a great deal to say about how fire
departments
communicate in the future: spectrum and money.

Foley points out that the Federal Communications Commission, late last year, opened the
700MHZ band for
use by emergency services. “That will be a big window of opportunity for the public safety
community,”
Foley says.

The other resource, money, may be more of a problem. For example, as it tries to improve
the
communications capability of its emergency services and address the issues raised in the
McKinsey report,
New York City will probably have less money with which to do so this year. A sluggish
national economy
and the damage the terrorist attacks perpetrated on the city's own economy has Mayor
Michael Bloomberg
and the city council talking about tax hikes and budget shortfalls. New York's experience
is not unique.

And what about firefighters in the rest of the country? Foley points out that 80% of the
fire departments in
the United States serve 5,000 or fewer people. Many of those departments are staffed by
volunteers who
must find the money to keep their training and equipment up to date. They find it in
municipal and county
budgets, such state and federal grants as they can scare up, pancake breakfasts, and
bingo.

“A lot of those departments struggle to keep up their apparatus and stuff,” Foley says.
“USFA grants are
available for communications equipment. This year, there was $300 million in FIRE Act
grant money. The
proposal is to raise it to $900 million. That's a drop in the bucket. Law enforcement gets
$33 billion.”

For Goldfeder, the main priority is straightforward: to be able to communicate clearly and
reliably on the
fireground. Once on the fireground, he doesn't much care whether his communications
technology is analog
or digital, where the money to buy it came from or how far apart the repeaters are. For
him, the question is
the one asked partly in jest by the tv commercial for a wireless telecom company: “Can you
hear me now?”

Ken Branson is a freelance writer.

Will headsets help?

Dan Soulier doesn't miss much. But there's a lot he doesn't hear.

“I have certifiably lost 68% [hearing] in my left ear and 54 in my right, related to the
job,” says Soulier,
deputy chief of administration in the Harrisburg (Pa.) Fire Department. “I have lost the
middle range, where
normal conversation goes on. It got so that I'd go out to dinner with my family, and I'd
have trouble hearing
what my children were saying, but silverware clanging at the next table was like nails on
a chalkboard.”

Soulier got hearing aids a couple of years ago “and now, I'm hearing things I haven't
heard in years,” he
says. He believes his younger colleagues will save their hearing and do their jobs better
because they use
headsets to communicate.

Harrisburg incident commanders, pump operators, truck operators and rooftop firefighters
wear headsets.
These headsets permit the firefighters to talk to each other and to their commanders, and
to hear each
other, without having to pick through extraneous noise. Soulier is surprised that more
departments don't use
them.

“My typical picture of an incident commander is of (someone) with the lapel mike up to his
ear, using the
antenna (of the portable radio) as a pointer,” Soulier says.

Not surprisingly, a similar image is in the minds of people who make and sell headsets and
intercoms. Their
pitch to fire departments is that headsets, attached to mobile or portable radios, are a
relatively easy way to
make sure that orders are clearly understood, that the right questions find the right
answers, and that
incident commanders, truck and pump operators can hear their colleagues speak and
themselves think.
Otherwise, they contend, everyone at a fire scene is reduced to shouting, cranking up the
volume on his or
her radio, and straining to hear through the static — all in vain.

“Turn the volume of the speaker up, and you just add noise,” says Gary Stamm, northeast
regional sales
manager for David Clark Co. of Worcester, Mass., which makes headsets, intercoms and
adapters.

A headset might be attached by a cord to a mobile radio in a truck, or it might be
attached by an adapter to
a portable radio carried by a firefighter. The headset has two big ear cups, or domes, and
a microphone
protruding from one of the domes to the firefighter's mouth.

Will Antunes, corporate sales manager for FireCom Inc., in Portland, Ore., has a clear
idea of who should
use his company's products.

“On-scene safety officers, incident commanders, etc. trying to hear the radio properly,”
Antunes says.
“They're keeping an ear open to hear people trying to call them. Meanwhile, people are
walking up and
shouting to them, there are sirens going, and the fire itself makes a lot of noise. A lot
of those problems can
be solved with a simple headset. It cuts out high-frequency noise by about 24dB.”

Antunes, Stamm and their competitors run into some resistance from potential customers.

“In the industry, there's often machismo that says, ‘Oh, well, it's loud, but we're big
boys and we can handle
it,’” Antunes says. “There's great apathy for hearing protection…. Largely it's gone
unnoticed.”

Stamm finds that many departments have other priorities.

“I think in a lot of cases they still feel that headsets and intercoms are luxury items,
rather than necessities,
and also they would rather have their trucks adorned with embellishments — more lights and
chrome bells
and that sort of thing,” he says.

Stamm is reminded of his main obstacle when he approaches a potential client at a trade
show. “The
typical scenario is, you'll speak to some older [firefighter] at a fire show, and he'll
say, ‘Huh?’”

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---

From: Rick Parrish <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 03:03:46 -0600

Marcel wrote:

>Wireless revolution
>
>December 9, 2002 1:34pm
>
>Consider, for instance, the "tooth phone," under development by Barry Mersky, a dentist from Bethesda, Md. The phone is a two-way wireless communications device fitted to a dental retainer. Earlier this year, Mersky showed his invention to the Homeland Security and Defense Symposium in Atlantic City, N.J. Mersky hopes to market his invention to first responders who work in high-noise environments. Reportedly, the device converts vibrations of the teeth into voice signals that can be heard in the 100dB range. Mersky told reporters the device would probably cost $200 per unit.
>  
>
The 90 volt ring voltage is sure to cure any problems with plaque build up.

-rick