I have extensive experience in public safety systems. Used to design, sell and build them when I worked for a Motorola MSS, I was also a 911 dispatcher. In addition I worked for years (and continue to) in the public safety systems as the county RACES officer and am part of the county EOC staff. I also sat on our county telecommunications committee as a volunteer, having helped work through the fire and public safety radio system upgrades and evaluated the consulting company that worked on the system I feel a decent amount of qualification to speak. Over 25 years in these arenas have given me a lot of real world experiences from all sides of the issue (not to mention 20 plus years military experience from the reserves). I still consult with the chairman of our county board on these issues.
One of the things that I find from the public safety personnel is that much of their knowledge comes from learning from their vendors. Not many are true communications enthusiasts and eat live and breathe the stuff like most of us do. If the vendor/shop they rely on and trust, is not pro-amateur radio the public safety person typically is not. If the vendor/shop is, the public safety agency tends to embrace things through amateur radio more. The success or failure of amateur radio implementation in any community, is in most cases personality and trust related when it comes to the emergency management staff knowing who those amateur radio operators are, and if they like/trust those people to do a good job, and that they will stay within their role and purpose and if they keep from doing anything that would embarrass any government officials. With regards to trying something for free, I have heard the elected officials balk at that believe it or not. They would rather have a company they can sue and/or point fingers at when something goes wrong. Case in point locally, when my county wanted to evaluate their systems and have recommendations made for system improvements and upgrades, they scoffed at my offering to do it free (I am a taxpayer, parent and at the time a firefighter). The county attorney said we can’t do that because they wanted someone to be able to shoulder liability. In a litigious society things like this happen. Those old sayings like nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM or nobody ever got fired for buying CISCO still ring true. Lewis, you bring up a good point about people who get paid to do things. My take on that is that too many WISP’s have never put a true dollar value on their time in relation to a per hour value. When a startup is broke and cash is scarce but time is plentiful, they do things for themselves thinking it’s a good thing because they didn’t have to spend money doing the task at hand. That works in the beginning but over time there are too many things one person must do in a day to get them all done. Too often I find that WISP’s don’t do a true evaluation of what might be cheaper to hire out and what they can do themselves to save the company money or have the necessary skill sets to do so. Coming from a high concentration of Alpha Males types, this industry many times will not do that honest evaluation. If for instance a WISP operator finds that their time is really worth $60 per hour to the company (not unreasonable and in many cases still too undervalued), they may find it cheaper to hire that electrician at less than $60 per hour get that task done AND they still have time to get the other important business tasks done to keep the company moving forward. This also follows through to where a WISP will do the things they like to do and ignore things that need to be done to grow their company. Marketing is a great example of this, WISP’s will blow that off and chase service tickets justifying to themselves that the ticket is an emergency and they need to keep their customer happy. Truth is they can hire that work out cheaper and then their can focus their efforts on marketing and increasing their customer counts and revenue much faster. It’s so easy to stay in the trap of I can do it myself and not spend any money, but rarely does anyone really look at the true amount of time they spent on learning to do that task and what it would have cost to just hire it out and spend on those hours on some other revenue producing thing for the company. A great exaggerated example would be, you don’t need to hire a lawyer to answer to charges in a court, you have the right to self-represent and you can study case law and the laws on your own and not spend the money to hire the lawyer. Given enough time anyone could do that, but do you have the time before you might have to sit in front of a judge and jury to do a good enough job to defend yourself? Thank You, Brian Webster www.wirelessmapping.com www.Broadband-Mapping.com From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Lewis Bergman Sent: Thursday, February 25, 2016 8:50 PM To: af@afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Tessco Show It doesn't sound like you have spent much time with public safety types. I have never met one that wouldn't rather try something free, even if it is obvious it wouldn't work. Jamie asked the question of PS types, not vendors. But, your evaluation of the issues involved in system failure doesn't seem to be based on any real familiarity with the systems, their users, or the process by which they procure them. I am really confused. There seems to be some disconnect between the WISP profession and every other one. By the logic presented to date, every WISP here is not nearly as good as a bunch of people who take no money for their service and just do this part time from whatever they cobble together from Best Buy. Obviously nobody should ever pay Brian to map anything since being paid to do a job obviously precludes him from doing it well. You damn sure should never buy a product from somebody like Chuck who spends great amounts of time engineering and testing them and is obviously qualified. Oh wait, he gets paid, damn, and I thought his stuff was so good till I realized he got paid for them. I just don't get it. Are your professions exempt or maybe you don't understand the problems like you think you do? On Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 7:18 PM Brian Webster <i...@wirelessmapping.com> wrote: One of the big reasons amateur radio systems tend to stay on line when all others fail is due to the simple fact that the amateur radio operators build and maintain their own networks. Public Safety Systems rely on commercial contractors to maintain and repair their systems. The agencies rarely have any good understanding of their systems when there is an outage and therefore they don’t have ways to overcome the problems. They deal with this by pouring a lot of money in to redundant and backup systems. In large scale disasters these commercial repair contracts get spread thin real fast and have soo many problems to fix all at the same time. Amateur radio systems have been put together with more creative solutions that cost little to nothing because it’s an all-volunteer effort. When things break they don’t just throw money at the problem to fix it. Jamie, the reason you don’t hear talk of amateur radio systems as shows like you are at is because they provide services for almost free, that does not sell equipment and services for the commercial vendors. I am not saying public safety systems should not have backup systems in place mind you, just stating the obvious that may not be so obvious to most. If you were selling stuff to make a living would you tell a potential client how to not purchase what you are offering? Do you see the cable companies showing consumers how to get free off the air TV? Thank You, Brian Webster www.wirelessmapping.com www.Broadband-Mapping.com From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Jaime Solorza Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2016 11:34 PM To: Animal Farm Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Tessco Show Yes as in anything we have good and not so good...my point was that HAM folks have had systems operating when no one else did and it makes sense that emergency agencies have knowledge and relationship with local folks just in case your state of the art system fails. Look at how thinking out of the box saved astronauts way back then...or poor analogy...when UFC first came out...all these high rank black belts got whooped by skinny juijitsu guy....now they have adapted and evolved...same thing to me...fuck the politics... make it work. Period On Feb 24, 2016 8:46 PM, "Colin Stanners" <cstann...@gmail.com> wrote: Well it's true there's a huge variety of people and experience in the ham community, it's certain there will be some that suck, and so it's a risk getting involved without good research first. But in general, they - or I should say us hams- have a very nice combination of tower sites, active hardware, spare hardware, RF knowledge and eagerness for community service so as to respond rapidly in any situation. I just hope more hams will evolve from old voice / kilobit-speed packet networks to new 2.3 / 5.9ghz IP systems so as to keep pushing boundaries and advancing the hobby. On Feb 24, 2016 9:00 PM, "Mike Hammett" <af...@ics-il.net> wrote: I'm guessing Lewis and one or two others have had some sort of bad dealing with a HAM and now hate the all forever for any impractical reason. ----- Mike Hammett <http://www.ics-il.com/> Intelligent Computing Solutions <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL> <https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions> <https://twitter.com/ICSIL> <http://www.midwest-ix.com/> Midwest Internet Exchange <https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange> <https://twitter.com/mdwestix> <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/> The Brothers WISP <https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp> <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg> _____ From: "Lewis Bergman" <lewis.berg...@gmail.com> To: af@afmug.com Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2016 8:33:56 PM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Tessco Show FirstNet is a joke. Hardly anyone has reached DHS' level 6 interoperability and they are going to replace all that hardware at a cost by some estimates of over $10 billion.There have been several hair brained schemes to pay for it but nobody has proposed a plan that is likely to succeed. The only viable option seems to let the carriers do it. Great, just what we need: a public safety system with all the reliability of our cell systems. Back on the HAM topic huh? The reason they don't like running exercises with them is that they are a crap shoot. Some are great, some are complete jokes. Nobody wants to be graded with the wildcard in the mix. On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 5:34 PM Jaime Solorza <losguyswirel...@gmail.com> wrote: well I attended some interesting sessions. The Public safety one had several speakers from industry , gov't and academia... Learned allot and will share some important items later but I asked a question that really caught them off guard.....there was no mention of any testing or work on their disaster scenarios which involved HAM radio guys. One of the members acknowledged that during Katrina and Bastrop emergencies...the HAM radio network was the only available in many places and then asked why they never mentioned using 4.9 GHz but only 2.4 and 5GHz...mu ch more to come about First Net and testing to be done on dangerous border.....Canada and US is April. Lots of stuff to share and some new antenna players I never saw before. Met Sakid Ahmed from Cambium and chatted for an hour ...learned some cool things.. Well late lunch and Tecate beckons....chime in later,,,,,talk amongst yourselves..topic is LMR over IP and IoT.... laters Jaime Solorza Wireless Systems Architect 915-861-1390
