Testing is crucial to determine possible radio issues, Houston IT official says during webinar

Johnson said the department’s Anritsu S412E is considered “the No. 1 tool in our van.” It is used for most of the city’s site-maintenance and interference testing, offering spectrum analysis and triangulation of interference sources (the two most common tend to be unlicensed microphones and bi-directional amplifiers, Johnson said). Each technician carries one, and a couple more are also available for the microwave sites.

“Obviously, preventive maintenance is extremely important to us,” Johnson said. “It’s our leading indicator if our noise floor goes up or if components are about to fail.”

The Anritsu is also used to determine in-building coverage, so that information can be relayed to firefighters in real time through dispatchers. Facility maps are acquired from property owners and loaded into the Anritsu for testing. That data—indicating where the good and the poor coverage exists in buildings—is then displayed on Google Earth and distributed to a fire dispatcher using GIS.

“If there’s a coverage deficiency in that building, they can go ahead and tell the person who is fighting the fire that there’s an issue in those areas and to use their training and operation procedures to change to a safe channel, whether it be conventional, the county, [or] whatever they deem necessary on that scene to make sure they have safe and reliable communications,” Johnson said.