Tait Communications recently announced that it was awarded a $2.1 million contract by the city of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, to deploy a mobile voice communications system that will consolidate three legacy networks into a single system that will serve all city agencies, including police, fire, EMS and public works. In the future, the system also is expected to provide mobile data communications.

Jim Wells County, Texas, also selected Tait to deploy a Project 25 system that will replace a legacy analog system and will be used by the sheriff’s department and state police, as well as local police, fire and EMS agencies. The system’s open architecture will allow the reuse of tower antennas, 400 portables and 60 pagers to save the county money, the company said.

The Enterprise Wireless Alliance announced that wireless communications pioneer Ted Rappaport will be the keynote speaker at its Enterprise Wireless 2012 Leadership Summit, which will be held Oct. 10-12 in Nashville, Tenn. Rappaport—holder of more than 100 U.S. and international patents and author of 18 wireless-communications books—is a professor of electrical engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute and is the director of the National Science Foundation’s Wireless Internet Center for Advanced Technology (WICAT), a multi-disciplinary research center that involves five universities.

Aeroflex unveiled the TM500 Test Mobile platform, which now supports enhanced inter-cell interference cancellation, or eICIC. According to the company, eICIC is designed to improve the overall performance of heterogeneous network deployments and is one of the main features specified for LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) in 3GPP Release10. The main application of eICIC is to improve cell-edge performance and coverage in HetNet deployment scenarios where nodes of different types—macro-, micro- and picocells—have coverage areas that partially overlap, the company said.

Finally, Anritsu said it has enhanced the E Series of its Site Master and Cell Master handheld analyzers by adding easyTest Tools (ETT). This function enables more experienced technicians to conveniently share their knowledge with less experienced technicians, by letting them create on a PC detailed work instructions for a particular instrument’s cable and antenna analyzer mode. All related setups, procedures and images then are stored in an ETT file that can be distributed via e-mail; firmware that exists in all Site Master and Cell Master analyzers allows the files to be viewed on the device’s screen. The result is more consistent and accurate tests when deploying and maintaining wireless networks, the company said.