Years ago, I worked as a consultant with a department that was having some serious conflicts between line firefighters and dispatchers. Because I was hired to work primarily with uniformed firefighters, I mostly heard their side of things. They told stories about dispatch errors and categorized dispatchers as lazy or incompetent. But when I asked what direct experience those firefighters had working and communicating with dispatchers apart from their own emergency response, the answer was very little.
When I suggested including dispatchers in the training sessions I was facilitating, I got strong pushback. “Why include them?” people asked. “We have nothing in common with them… READ MORE
Carrollton, Texas – The National Fire Protection Agency, or the NFPA, has issued requirements for many businesses which require the installation and maintenance of Public Safety DAS. These requirements are intended to enforce a base level of wireless connectivity in public spaces. This is to ensure a standard of connection quality that first responders can rely on in emergency situations. While the NFPA requirements have been stated clearly, many businesses find themselves non-compliant. Many more struggle to find a reliable company that offers quality DAS services in order to make themselves compliant…
Many Internet of Things (IoT) systems solve a single problem. They are designed as standalone or one-off solutions because organizations are often under pressure to deploy a solution quickly. As
a result, it is easier to adapt an existing system by bolting on the components that enable connectivity, for remote access and data gathering, and linking to a cloud-based data management system
for analytics and visualization purposes. During the design phase, it is also easy to overlook how such a system might evolve or be supported in a lifecycle sense…
Untethered drones carrying a payload heavy enough to deliver LTE connectivity have demonstrated flight times approaching two hours, which would make their usage much more practical in key first-responder scenarios, public-safety representatives said during last week’s Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) 2021 virtual event.
Five teams demonstrated an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) that supported flight times of at least 60 minutes during the final “Last Drone Standing” stage PSCR’s First Responder UAS Endurance Challenge, according to results of the prize challenge announced last week. A multi-rotor drone that leverages both gas and electric energy designed by the Advanced Aircraft Company team from Hampton, Va., posted the longest flight time of 112 minutes—six times longer than the best flight time logged in the 2018 UAS challenge sponsored by PSCR… 2022.
These days, data is coming at law enforcement from all sides — body and dash cams, cellphone locations, license plate readers, reports and so on. So Motorola Solutions, a giant of law enforcement technology, is launching a cloud solution meant to bring it all into one place.
The CommandCentral suite acts, at its core, as a gateway to many different applications. It can bring together 911 dispatch activity with real-time video feeds, records such as incident reports and even information about what’s happening inside jails…
The following is a compilation of ideas I presented in a Mission Critical Communications article (August 2019) and in previous Advocates, along with updated information and further thoughts.
My vision of the ultimate device for public-safety Next-Generation 9-1-1 (NG911), FirstNet, and Land Mobile Radio (LMR) includes a common Internet Protocol (IP) backend. Radios would be a smart combination of LMR and FirstNet that, for the most part, would be controlled by the networks. These radios would deliver information first responders need to do their jobs and they would be capable of off-network (simplex) one-to-one and one-to-many communications…
Learn about current efforts to continue to protect the 4.9 GHz Band for public safety as well as recent filings, key decisions impacting these efforts, and how you can support PSSA’s initiative to protect the 4.9 GHz band for public safety.
