EWA unveils new CEVO mobile app to identify available spectrum

LAS VEGAS—Finding available spectrum to support LMR systems in the four most important bands now can be done quickly and easily via CEVO, a free mobile application developed by the Enterprise Wireless Alliance (EWA) that will be showcased this week at IWCE 2014.

EWA President and CEO Mark Crosby said the CEVO—short for “coordination evolution”—application will be available for Android and iOS devices. With the development of the mobile app, EWA hopes to simplify the process associated with finding spectrum, which “is getting considerably more complicated than it probably needs to be,” he said.

“I always want to improve things to help our customers,” Crosby said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “And I’m sitting here going, ‘You can book a flight to Thailand and back—with limos—on the Internet. So, why do you have to fill out a bunch of forms to find out if there’s spectrum available in Cleveland? We’ve got to make this easy.’

“It’s EWA’s job to handle all of the difficult stuff—the compliance with the rules and all of that. But, for the customer, let’s make the transaction easy.”

To query CEVO about available spectrum, the user needs to input the geographic location for the search, antenna height, the power of the signal, and whether the proposed system is for business/industrial use or for public-safety use, Crosby said. The other key input for the query is the spectrum band being targeted—VHF, UHF, 800 MHz and 900 MHz, he said.

“In a perfect world, within five minutes or 10 minutes, the phone [app] comes back and says, ‘Here are frequencies that are available for this system that are in compliance with the rules,’” Crosby said. “And it shows every available frequency within that band … And, by the way, this is free.”