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Kitsap County in pursuit of stolen Honda. End up in the area of Sedgwick and Bethel.

WSP plane doing emphasis at Sedgwick and the Hwy16 the whole time.

WSP plane never heard about it till to late. They keep talking about each other and trying to communicate through their dispatchers but cannont talk to each other direct.


Go to freaking LERN!

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"A well regulated breakfast, being necessary to the healthy start of the day, the right of the people to keep and eat food shall not be infringed."

You could promote an educational program like "Learn LERN!"

Alas, this is a common ailment among many Public Safety Agencies. This void has been most noticeable across jurisdictional boundaries - county / state or federal agencies. We emphatically train and practice the IMS system, and Blue Card, and the NFA Order Model, but many of us operate within entirely different radio system formats.

P25 was one such interoperability idea, . . . but it still so common to see vast differences in radio formats and spectrum bands between neighboring jurisdictions. Don't get me wrong here, . . . P25 has it's own system design challenges to overcome too. But that's a different $$$ topic for another day.

Operationally, unless there is a champion within the individual agency field ranks to further the interoperability causes, such planning efforts often are overlooked. Sadly, most field personnel and many Public Safety administrators don't fully understand radio anyway. The troops need to embrace the fact that radio equipment can truly save your life - if you honestly know how to use it. What is the one single tool that all Public Safety personnel use everyday, on every shift ? The radio.

However, if you were to place the various system techs in room and tell them to make it work, they'd have it figured out in about 30 minutes because that's what techs do. But techs of course work for radio system administrators - who develop and carry out their agency rules - both according to budget priorities, customer desires, and risk management needs.

The reality is that Public Safety agency administrators have greater concerns to worry about. Budgets administratively rule the day. That's the hard truth. And Public Safety funding ( local tax revenues ) are designed to be very geo-specific. It is not a popular practice to use local tax funding to further enhance or invest in a neighboring ( disparate ) radio system.

Thankfully, we are now encouraged with the recent advent of I.P in the radio world over the last decade - as that level of connectivity opens up huge possibilities for dispatcher console activated inter-connectivity / patching possibilities.

Without dedicated funding and some strong state administrative WAC code language I fear that this process could continue to falter and further drift as radios systems continue to evolve.

One of the issues I see with that is the vast amount of 'other' stuff one needs to understand...Statutes, administrative codes, court rules, the latest legal bulletins, bail schedules, geography, agency rules-policies-procedures, jurisdictional (City/County/Etc) ordinances and regs, firearms, driving, wanted persons/warrant lists, etc etc. Some stuff gets left behind.

Fixed.

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President-in-Exile, Seattle Area Radio Communications And Scanner Traffic Intercept Crew (SARCASTIC)
Don't feel bad if you can't use your STD100/200; there are still people using Digital Frequency Search!
Bunnery definition for the under-fives

Fixed.[/quote]

My calendar is open!

But withstanding the legalese- When in doubt.. go to LERN! (if its open for use) or did I read that in their SOP wrong??

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"A well regulated breakfast, being necessary to the healthy start of the day, the right of the people to keep and eat food shall not be infringed."

I'm glad this happens in areas with multi-million dollar systems in place, too.

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Interoperability is an attitude, not a technology.

A- Kitsap County has a multi-million dollar radio system?

B- Doesn't Moses Hole run a fully encrypted 800mhz Tait system? How's interoperability there in VHF land?

C- Interoperability is a mindset, despite what is said on my monthly NPSTC conference calls.

_________________
President-in-Exile, Seattle Area Radio Communications And Scanner Traffic Intercept Crew (SARCASTIC)
Don't feel bad if you can't use your STD100/200; there are still people using Digital Frequency Search!
Bunnery definition for the under-fives

A. yes- They originally spent just over 10 million but that went up a little as they added a couple of sites.

C. Its a mindset that needs to be beaten into a few people before the Motorola, Kenwood, Harris, (ect) sales people get to them.

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"A well regulated breakfast, being necessary to the healthy start of the day, the right of the people to keep and eat food shall not be infringed."

I don't know...I know of a local government that went Harris. The rep suggested a bank of interop talkgroups for roaming to/working with users of the statewide trunked system. The local government policy makers gave that idea an emphatic NO. They even vetoed the handful of statewide simplex interops freqs, thus screwing end users yet again.

I do know, from my own experience, that attempting to find and switch to another radio channel during a high-speed pursuit is not easily accomplished. A good dispatcher could patch and/or regroup(?) the radio users involved, but that would require training for a rare event. Diversity training is more important to admin.

_________________
President-in-Exile, Seattle Area Radio Communications And Scanner Traffic Intercept Crew (SARCASTIC)
Don't feel bad if you can't use your STD100/200; there are still people using Digital Frequency Search!
Bunnery definition for the under-fives

One of the bigger problems with patches is that it still takes the bulk of the signal away from the incident and places it further away. One big idea about interops is that they should keep the radios RF close by so that all those at the scene can definitely hear whats going on. When this traffic is repeated there is always the chance that the local high rf from the mobiles will desense the others right up close and make reception of the further out base stations very difficult. Out of band interop is not that big of an issue. But say patching one VHF to another..

Single button channel on the face of the radio can help in this situation. "Primary" "Car4" "State" "LERN" < like that across the face.

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"A well regulated breakfast, being necessary to the healthy start of the day, the right of the people to keep and eat food shall not be infringed."

Here you go

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"I was installing un-programmed radios"

Yes. Yes they do. And in fact, I'm still selling and installing VHF radios in fire rigs especially after these past few weeks, they've all found out they can't talk to shit, even in their own county. A lot of "Go to 800 R/R A1!"

Edit: Law stuff encrypted only. Fire stuff in the clear. Even Fire can't listen to Law in their own county.

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Interoperability is an attitude, not a technology.

Kinda reminds me how the DOD wouldn't let the Coast Guard have the encryption keys for non Selective Availability GPS signals. Although the CG defeated S/A by developing DGPS in 1996, Bill Clinton turned off S/A in 2000. Your tax dollars hard at work...

Well, then there is always this:

http://onenet.wa.gov/siec-state-interoperability-executive-committee/