Oct 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Donny Jackson

Intelligent radios prepare to make the move from military operations to public safety

After years of being limited to debates regarding the long-term future of communications, software-defined radio and cognitive radio have become factors in present-day decision-making as increasing numbers of products and tests demonstrate the real-world applicability of the technologies.

While these technologies have been used by the military for years, the expensive design of those radios made them impractical for budget-conscious public-safety entities. But the introduction of software-defined multiband public-safety radios from Thales Communications, Harris and Motorola — all of which are expected to be generally available during the first half of next year — has caused the tenor of discussions to move from the theoretical to the practical, said Fred Frantz, director of the advanced research department for global security and engineering solutions for L-3 Communications and chairman of the SDR Forum's public-safety special interest group.

“I think it's definitely made it much more real for people,” Frantz said. “There was some skepticism … going back a couple of years, from the standpoint of a lot of people feeling like, ‘This has been talked about for awhile, but is anybody really going to put something on the market?’

“Now, with the multiband radios, [the question is] not so much now whether it's anything that's going to happen. Now, it's getting into specific feature sets and implementations because people are able to see what the products are starting to look like.”

Currently, the primary feature that is attractive to public safety is the spectral flexibility of the new software-defined radios. With most public-safety agencies operating on UHF, VHF or 800 MHz frequencies, having a single radio that can operate in each of these bands at the turn of a knob promises to be a boon to interoperability initiatives.

While multiband radios are ideal for interoperability and backup radio caches, agencies also can use them to effectively increase the amount of spectrum available to them, said Steve Nichols, Thales' director of business development for DHS/public safety.

“When people went to 800 MHz, a lot of them didn't turn in their UHF and VHF channels — they were saving them for a rainy day,” Nichols said during last month's meeting of the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council (NPSTC), where Thales demonstrated peer-to-peer communications with radios from disparate manufacturers operating in four different bands. “With this, you can put them back into play.”

Certainly that is the case when systems are built on open standards such as P25. But the issue that continues to plague this vision is the fact that the vast majority of public-safety communications systems use waveforms that are proprietary to specific vendors, meaning third-party radios cannot operate on those systems.

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