MCVs have come a long way

There was a time when mobile command vehicles, or MCVs, were little more than converted trucks. In those early days, a law enforcement agency would take a recreational vehicle, place a few radios in it and call it a mobile command vehicle, according to Larry La Guardia, sales development manager at Burlington, Wis.-based LDV, which has been customizing vehicles for command-and-control applications since the 1980s.

“They weren’t the most capable vehicles by today’s standards, but they were state-of-the-art back then,” La Guardia said.

Certainly that was the case for the Delaware State Police’s first MCV. “At best, it was equipped with multiple radios, plus a telephone,” said Bill Carrow, Delaware State Police chief of communications and APCO Mid-Eastern Chapter past president and group operations leader.

In contrast, Carrow said the Delaware State Police’s LDV-built MCV, acquired in 2004, is a wonder of communications technology. Equipped with a motorized slide-out bay, the 40-foot long MCV supports radio, cellular and satellite communications for voice, video and data. Inside, it is well-equipped with radio terminals, a Sytech RIOS interoperability system, laptop computers with on-board networking and flat panel monitors — which are highly useful for watching live video linked to the MCV by any camera/wireless-equipped Delaware State Police helicopter within 40 miles.

“We don’t have to worry about parking close to dangerous incident scenes, or moving as the scene shifts because we can see what’s happening in real-time from helicopter video units,” Carrow said. “That’s a real advantage for us in staying on top of the situation.”

That’s not all: The department’s MCV can interface seamlessly into its main computer-aided dispatch system. “Upon arrival, we take over dispatch for the incident, while keeping the main dispatch in the loop in real-time,” Carrow said. “We can also link up to eight trucks together by telephone intercom so that we can interoperate together without using RF.”

There are few first responder tools that have benefited as greatly from technological progress as the MCV. This progress — achieved over the past 30 years — has multiplied the communications paths available to first responders, increased the amount of data that each path can carry and identified ways to make these different paths come together to provide more functionality. The result has been ever-more-capable vehicles.

“We are now in our third generation of MCV,” Carrow said. “In that time, we’ve seen advances such as cellular telephones, portable satellite communications and interoperable radio bridges come into being, and the MCV market has been quick to seize upon each of them.”

With each advance came more capability, Carrow said. “I can remember the difference it made to our mobile incident commanders to have access to cellular telephone in addition to land mobile radio, then to get departments with incompatible radio equipment to talk to each other using interoperable radio bridges like the Sytech RIOS.”

According to Roman Kaluta, director of interoperability solutions for Raytheon JPS Communications, makers of the ACU-1000 audio bridge, the most significant change to MCVs “by far,” is the introduction of IP-based solutions.

“In the early days, we were known as the ‘black box company,’ installing audio bridges in tactical and transportable platforms. Now we’re heavily committed to open standard, IP-based communications applications,” Kaluta said, adding that IP lets first responders backhaul communications resources to and from the incident scene. In addition, the company had added devices that can perform as a backup repeater in a forward position and seamlessly integrate a satellite uplink into an MCV’s communications suite linked to multiple radio and telephone systems.

As MCV capabilities have multiplied, their size has grown — it is now common to see MCVs built into 52-foot long trailers, buses and large-scale RVs. “The emphasis is on the ability to bring as many possible resources to the scene as you can,” Kaluta said. “As capabilities have increased — including the ability for a MCV to generate its own power in Katrina-like situations — so has the vehicle size.”

But not everyone believes that bigger is better.

“I think that some of them are so big that they are only used for very big incidents and have lost some of their usefulness on smaller events,” said Charlie Edwards, a two-way radio dealer and Central District fire chief for the Lincoln Parish (La.) Fire Department. “I personally think that something the size of a UPS delivery truck would make for the most rapid deployment. Anything bigger than that — or something that’s trailer-based — would take longer to deploy and more manpower to set up.”

The same sort of thinking can be found in rural Cambria County, Pa. Rather than buy a big MCV, the county installed a four-channel Incident Commanders’ Radio Interface (ICRI), manufactured by Communications-Applied Technology, in the assistant fire chief’s Chevy Suburban. By doing so, they can plug up to four incompatible radios into this single unit and use the ICRI to automatically switch audio feeds between them.

“The ICRI works fantastically for us,” said Brian Feist, executive director of the state’s Department of Emergency Management. “As a result, it will be at the heart of a 22-foot MCV that we are building with Homeland Security funds.” The new vehicle will have extra features such as a meeting area, cameras, and a light tower. But it will be smaller than most MCVs, making it more usable and portable for day-to-day operations.

Cambria County is a member of Pennsylvania’s Region 13 Task Force, which is comprised of 13 counties in the western portion of the state and includes the city of Pittsburgh. According to Feist, several MCVs are either ready to be delivered or in the specification phase.

“What we are attempting to do is add similar equipment to all of the vehicles,” Feist said. “That way, no matter who we put in the vehicle from any of the 13 counties [surrounding] Pittsburgh, they will be familiar with the equipment — like the ICRI — and its operations.”

State and county agencies aren’t the only ICRI adopters. There are lots of “three letter federal agencies who use the ICRI,” said C-AT President Seth Leyman, including the Department of Homeland Security. Clearly, even the big boys believe that, in some instances, less is more.

While MCVs shrink and become more nimble, they also will become more tightly integrated with their departments’ dispatch networks, “so that they literally become extensions of them,” said Paul Bickford, president of Bickford Broadcast Vehicles, whose Bickford Code 3 subsidiary makes a full range of MCVs for the American Red Cross and Maryland State Police, among others. “This technology has lots of growth left in it,” Bickford said.

Add the federal government’s emphasis on making first responders truly interoperable, and the future is bright both for MCVs and for the manufacturers and dealers that supply them. For land mobile radio vendors looking for new sales opportunities and new markets, the mobile command vehicle market is worthy of consideration.