[Scan-DC] Montgomery County police officers receive better radios

[Alan Henney]

http://www.gazette.net/stories/05042011/bethnew212449_32546.php

Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Montgomery County police officers receive better radios
New frequency will reduce interference from cell phones, officials say
by Jeremy Arias | Staff Writer
The Montgomery County Police Department has begun distributing new and improved radios to its officers that will allow them to communicate better with other departments and cut down on interference from cell phones.

The switch will become complete as soon as the Federal Communications Commission has finished re-tuning the radio frequencies of public safety agencies across the region, police officials said.

Due to signal interference in the 800 megahertz frequency range currently used by county police and fire/rescue personnel, county and federal officials first began to consider shifting to a different frequency block in 2004, said Officer Chris Johnson, the department's Radio Systems Manager.

"The frequencies that are used by cell phones and private users were too close to the frequencies used by public safety agencies like the police department," Johnson said. "In a nutshell, in 2004 the FCC mandated that 800 MHz frequencies be re-banded in order to reduce frequency interference."

While the cost of the transition is being paid for by the county police's radio service provider, Sprint Nextel, as per the county's contract regarding upgrades, delays based on a lack of space in nearby frequency ranges held the project back until recently, Johnson said.

But once the transfer from analog to digital TV broadcasts was completed in the United States in summer 2009, the entire 700 MHz range was freed up for private auction and governmental use. The 764 to 776 MHz and the 794 to 806 MHz blocks were allotted to public safety agencies by the FCC, said Nada Golmie and Camillo Gentile of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which conducted a study of the 700 MHz band propagation in November 2010.

While re-banding to the lower 800 and 700 MHz frequencies won't have much of an impact on how much farther signals carry, the 700 range is well within the ideal range for an area like Montgomery County, Gentile said.

"Propagation would be most favorable [to that range] in a suburban as opposed to in an urban, more cluttered environment," he said.

Originally the FCC suggested that county officials use a temporary communications system while the department's radios were upgraded to handle the new frequency range, but, because the department was planning to replace its radios in the next three years anyway, county officials authorized the early purchase of new radios using county Capital Improvements Program funds instead, Johnson said.

"That money was already assigned, and by spending it now, we saved $5 million dollars over a period of four years, which is a huge deal," he said. "[So now] we're about three weeks into installing mobile radios, and we're starting to hand out portable radios."

In addition to the bulk savings, once the re-tuning process has been completed across the region, Montgomery County officers will be able to more easily communicate with their colleagues in Washington, D.C., and Prince George's County, Johnson said.

Prince George's police have already had their radios re-tuned to the 700 MHz band while the Metropolitan Police Department will complete the process in the next year, Johnson estimated.

Under the current radio configuration, Montgomery County officers cannot speak directly to Metropolitan Police Department officers - who still operate on the 400 MHz band - without first going through a lengthy patch-through process with the District of Columbia Fire Department and Metropolitan Police dispatchers, Johnson said.

"We only have a hailing channel [with them]," he said. "If our officer needs to talk to D.C. police, we would switch to a citywide channel and tell the [D.C. police] dispatcher what we need to do, and then if we needed to talk to another radio user directly, we could be patched through."

Despite these improvements and upgrades, county police will remain on channels that are open to members of the public to listen to, Johnson said. Some departments, including the Metropolitan Police, are looking at ways to encrypt their radio frequencies, making them unreadable to commercial scanners, he said.

"We are currently not encrypting our operating channels," he said. "I can't say that three years from now that's still going to be the case, but the reality is that, our system right now is not capable of [encrypting]."

jarias at gazette.net