By MATT MYERHOFF
After Hurricane Katrina, helicopters were sent to pluck a storm victim from the same New Orleans rooftop. Because emergency workers couldn’t talk with each other, survivors elsewhere were left waiting.
It’s the kind of problem that occurs in the chaos of natural disasters, including Southern California’s wildfires and earthquakes.
“We’ve got to have radio interoperability,” said Kevin Nida, a fire captain and president of the California Association of Firefighters. “In wildland fires, the wind can shift and the fire can come toward a crew that was initially safe. It comes up every time.”
Police, fire and other emergency officials are watching a military radio being developed by a local Boeing Co. unit.
First responders hope the radio, being designed for military uses at Boeing’s Strategic Systems unit in Anaheim, can be adapted for civilian use.
Boeing engineers just completed the first working Joint Tactical Radio System, which will be delivered to the Army in January for field tests.
The military is building the radios as part of its drive toward “netcentric warfare,” which allows various levels of communication among satellites, ground, air and sea forces and the command center.
The radios use software to transmit encrypted voice, video and data in digital packets,much the way the Internet transmits data. They also allow users to scan for and grab any radio frequency being broadcast, instead of being locked into one channel.
At $270,000 per radio, the models developed for the military are far too expensive for state and local agencies, even with increased funding from the Department of Homeland Security.
“The real question is whether there is a way to leverage the technology for a product that would meet public safety requirements at a price point they can afford,” said Fred Frantz, director of law enforcement programs at L-3 Communications Holdings Inc.’s government services unit in Virginia.
L-3 is working on a different phase of the military radio project.
“In the next year or so, we’ll be looking into whether it is feasible to come up with a stripped-down variant, without all the military specifications,” Frantz said.
Boeing Integrated Defense Systems is lead contractor for the $856 million contract to develop the radio and eventually provide more than 20,000 of the 84-pound devices. Depending on the number of units produced, the work could total $15.6 billion.
The program ran into trouble in the summer. The military warned it might cancel the contract. But engineers and military personnel at Boeing’s Anaheim labs and at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., made the prototype radios talk to each other and to current military radios in 14 miles of desert conditions.
For now, the contract is in place but it is being restructured.
Boeing is working with the government on a plan for the project, company spokesman Jerry Drelling said.
“We and our teammates take very seriously our responsibility to resolve these concerns,” he said.
He declined to discuss the project’s potential for use in civilian emergencies.
Stopgap methods have been adapted to link police, fire and other emergency personnel at low cost. Radios now in use by police and fire departments cost $1,500 to $3,000 per unit. A typical small city police department needs a couple of hundred units, according to Frantz.
Gear from L-3 acts as a “patch,” basically picking up one radio signal and sending it out on other frequencies, Frantz said.
The system, funded by the Justice Department, allows 20 local and federal law agencies in the Washington, D.C., area to talk on different frequencies with almost no loss of sound quality. It was installed at around $150,000.
Safety officials have used other patches for years. During an emergency with more than one fire or agency responding, a system rebroadcasts voice transmissions on different frequencies so agencies can talk to each other.
Los Angeles County emergency services have four patch systems and the city of L.A. has seven, all built by Raytheon JPS Communications, a division of Waltham, Mass.-based defense contractor Raytheon Co. The patches are relatively inexpensive, available and handily accomplish the basic goal of radio interoperability. They have other problems, though, such as too many voices on the same network, according to the firefighters association’s Nida.
“The patches work,” he said. “But the more channels you patch together, the more you increase the volume on a very busy network.”
During the Metrolink accident near Glendale in January, the channels were so busy that patching them would have crashed the system.
“For that incident we needed less radio traffic and more face-to-face communication,” Nida said. “At that point, the interoperability is almost as bad a problem as not having any.”
Myerhoff is a staff writer with the Los Angeles Business Journal.
