While the radio on your hip gets most of the attention, the bigger change in public-safety communications this decade is happening somewhere less visible: the 911 center and the data pipe between it and the field. The move from analog 911 to an internet-based system, precise caller location, text an [...]

There is a wave of technology promising to give a firefighter crawling a smoke-filled hallway, or a tactical team stacked on a door, a live map of the space and the people inside it. Some of it is real and improving fast. Some of it is a research demo in [...]

For a century, "communications" for a fire or EMS department meant one thing: your radio system. If you were inside its footprint, you talked; if you were outside it, you were on your own. That is no longer true. Cellular push-to-talk, public-safety LTE, and a new generation of low-earth-orbit satel [...]

There is a sales pitch making the rounds, and if you sit through enough vendor briefings you will hear it: satellite data, now as fast as 5G, everywhere, on the phone already in your pocket. It is a compelling story, and the technology underneath it is genuinely real and genuinely [...]

The most consequential change in public-safety technology this decade is not a new radio. It is a new invoice. The industry is moving, deliberately and fast, from "buy the equipment and own it for fifteen years" to "subscribe to the capability, forever." For a chief or a commissioner, this is [...]

Every few years a new communications term makes the rounds at conferences, gets pitched by a salesperson, and lands on a chief's desk with a quote attached. FirstNet is one of those terms, and it has real substance behind it, which is exactly why it gets oversold. This is a [...]

A talkgroup plan looks fine on a spreadsheet in a quiet office. The real test comes at 0300 on a working structure fire with a mutual aid engine you have never worked with, a probie who has been off orientation for two weeks, and a battalion chief trying to move [...]

Most radio projects are judged by whether the radios key up on cutover day. The best ones are judged by whether they still key up at hour seven of a bad night, in the basement of a hospital, when a tower has lost commercial power. This is a profile of [...]

Encrypting your radio traffic is a real tool with real trade-offs, and the departments that get burned are usually the ones that treated it as a simple on-off switch. Lock down the wrong channels and you can strand a mutual-aid partner who cannot hear your incident commander, or bury your [...]

A radio purchase is the longest commitment your department will make short of a building. The apparatus turns over in fifteen years, the roof in thirty, but the radio infrastructure and the vendor relationship behind it will shape your budget, your interoperability, and your crews' safety for a gene [...]