Oakland's new radios pass test
City, regional agencies get green light to buy public-safety equipment

By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
Inside Bay Area

With a preliminary battery of tests this week in Arizona, the supplier of public-safety radio systems to Oakland, Richmond and the Bay Area Rapid Transit District proved that its latest radios will be able to communicate with other manufacturers' radios, potentially saving the region millions of dollars.

Lowell, Mass.-based M/A-COM unless the company showed its radios met the
latest standards for interoperability.

As of Wednesday, they do. The test results remove the last barrier to Oakland's planned purchase of about 2,000 hand held radios for at least $8 million to replace the decade-old radios now carried by city police, firefighters, public works engineers and other employees.

City's radios get green light

For police, the radios are their single most used piece of personal equipment and nearly the most expensive. Each new handset will cost the city about $2,700, not including likely future software upgrades costing $1,000 to $1,500 apiece. In essence, what city workers would get are highly rugged, handheld computers reliant on software to gain access to a radio network, compress and send messages.

Until recently, makers of almost all public-safety radios made the software and the radio signature of the transmissions proprietary and so unable to communicate with other makers' radios. But after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, there has been a national drive to drop those barriers so first responders in different cities and counties can talk in a disaster as well as routine emergencies.

The East Bay is moving in that direction, toward a common, regional radio network shared by at least Alameda and Contra Costa counties and all of their cities, now operating with a patchwork of radio systems that largely cannot communicate with one another without delay.

One way of getting different radios to communicate is to apply a set of technical standards known as Project 25, or P25 for short.

Oakland's supplier, M/A-COM, had made other radios in other frequency bands meet the P25 standards but until recently had not proved the same thing for radios operating at 800 MHz, the frequency used by BART, Alameda County, Oakland, San Francisco, Richmond and smaller cities that share their radio networks. Without proven interoperability, federal radio experts advised Oakland against the purchase. Oakland officials insisted on a test.

M/A-COM quickly shipped radios to Arizona, where Phoenix, Mesa and other cities are joined in a massive common radio network spanning 2,000 square miles. Once programmed onto the network, M/A-COM's radios shared messages and other alerting functions with P25 radios made by Motorola and E.F. Johnson.

"It worked fine," said Joe Noce, Mesa project manager for the Phoenix-Mesa network. "It's not vaporware, they do have a functioning radio."

John Powell, head of the Homeland Security Department's expert panel for most of California, applauded M/A-COM and said the results cleared up any doubts. His panel is rewriting its recommendations to Oakland, advising the city to require the new P25 features in its radios.

"They've done a yeoman's job in getting it out there," he said.

Oakland communications officials could not be reached Thursday, but the tests are good news for the city, which by some estimates has $30 million invested in radio equipment that M/A-COM maintains. Had the radios not worked out, Oakland would have been faced with fast-aging radios and the prospect of paying a larger share of the cost for a new network of transmission towers and repeaters.

"The city of Oakland has invested a lot of money in infrastructure, and they can buy radios for that infrastructure now and still be ready for a regional system in the future," said Greg Farmer, product manager for M/A-COM.

Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com

To see this article on the Oakland Tribune website click here.