A structure fire runs on a handful of channels most crews already know by heart. Specialty operations do not work that way. When you are working a hazmat release from a distance, digging into a collapse where radios go dead, or spread across miles of ground with the wind moving [...]

The worst time to figure out who talks to whom is at 3 a.m. with a working fire and three mutual-aid companies rolling in. A written communications standard operating procedure will not make you sound smooth on the radio, but it will make sure every member knows which channel to [...]

A radio is the one tool on the truck that has to work every single time, and radios are expensive enough that the used market looks like an easy win when the budget is tight. Sometimes it is. But a used portable can arrive locked to somebody else's system, running [...]

The 911 system your grandparents used ran on the same analog phone network that carried a voice call across town. That network is being replaced, quietly and unevenly, with an internet-based backbone called Next Generation 911. For a responding department, the change is easy to miss, because most of [...]

Every radio on your rig is the end product of a long argument between two hard facts: there is only so much usable spectrum, and public safety needs to reach everyone on it at once, clearly, and without waiting. The story of fire and EMS radio is really the story [...]

Every responder has felt the moment a radio goes quiet at the worst possible time. Amateur radio, often called ham radio, is one of the few communication tools that keeps working when cell towers, internet, and even the county trunked system are down. It is not a replacement for your [...]

When the power is out and the cell towers are choked, the households that stay in touch are the ones that thought about it in advance. The General Mobile Radio Service, better known as GMRS, is one of the simplest ways for a family or a neighborhood to build that [...]

The two-way radio a firefighter keys up on the fireground still moves voice over the air, but almost everything behind that push-to-talk button now runs on a data network. If you keep a modern land mobile radio system alive, you are already doing network administration whether or not anyone gave [...]

The radio administrator who spent a career thinking in terms of coverage maps, talkgroups, and antenna gain now manages a system that lives on a network, answers to remote management consoles, and shares a lot of DNA with the IT department down the hall. That shift changes the job, and [...]

The General Radiotelephone Operator License, or GROL, is one of those credentials that sounds like it must be mandatory for anyone who touches a radio, and it turns out it is mandatory for almost no one in public safety. It is a real, lifetime commercial license from the FCC, it [...]