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 [...]
If a rail line runs through your district, the railroad is a partner you have not met yet. Trains move on their own communications systems, on their own schedules, and often through the worst parts of your jurisdiction to reach. When something goes wrong at a crossing, in a yard, [...]
Most jurisdictions can name every fire hydrant and every propane tank inside their boundaries, but ask a chief to list every place an aircraft can take off or land and you will usually get a blank stare. Aviation is one of the most overlooked layers of local risk and one [...]
A small aircraft can now put a live overhead picture above a working incident in the time it takes to stage the first engine. That capability is real, it is increasingly common in public safety, and it comes wrapped in a certificate, a rulebook, and a set of open questions [...]
Most of the infrastructure your community depends on during an emergency is watched over and adjusted by computer systems that almost no one outside the utility ever sees. When those systems work, water flows, lights stay on, and traffic moves. When they fail or are interrupted, the problem lands sq [...]
Radios and satellite navigation feel like utilities that are simply there when you key up or glance at a map. Most of the time they are. But every communications officer and emergency manager should understand two ways those signals can fail on you without a single piece of your own [...]
The radio in the cab gets most of the attention and most of the budget, but the piece that actually decides whether you get out of a bad spot is the antenna bolted to the roof and the ground plane under it. A high-priced radio feeding a poorly chosen or [...]
A base station is only as good as the metal in the air and the cable feeding it. You can spend well on a radio and still get weak, patchy coverage if the antenna is the wrong pattern for the job, mounted too low, or fed by a long run [...]
A portable radio on your belt puts out a couple of watts into a stubby antenna, which is fine until you are two ridges away from the person you need to reach. A repeater is the fix: a radio that listens on one frequency and, at the very same instant, [...]
In Part 1 we followed a single analog repeater sitting on a hill, listening on one frequency and re-transmitting on another so two portables that cannot hear each other directly can still talk. That machine is the seed of everything that follows. When one hilltop is not enough to cover [...]
