Mobilizing Your Communications

Emergency responders deal in chaos. The situations we are called upon to manage are extraordinary. We respond to them with carefully crafted and executed plans. But how do we plan for the situation that turns the public's emergency into our service's emergency? Ultimately, we must create redundancy.

     Responders create redundancy through mutual aid-planning for the depletion of resources by developing agreements with neighboring agencies. But communications are different. How can a neighboring agency move its building full of radios, telephones and personnel to another city or county? Connecting electronically is one way, but true redundancy requires the ability to keep things running in all types of disasters, even when power and wireless connectivity are lost. True redundancy essentially means packing up the building and taking it where it needs to go.

     Captain Ray Mercer is the Systems Administrator for MedStarOne's communications. MedStarOne is the EMS response arm of Memorial Health University Medical Center in Savannah, GA. In their quest for better regional disaster preparedness, MedStarOne personnel decided they needed a mobile communications center that was capable of going anywhere and communicating with anyone.

     "Nobody made what we wanted," says Mercer. The State of Georgia and the Department of Homeland Security had a mobile command vehicle, but Mercer wasn't that impressed. "It's pretty," he says of the vehicle, "but it uses some basic VHF communications and landlines. It's limited."

     Good fortune smiled on MedStarOne with a hand-me-down truck from Memorial Health's neonatal transport team. The truck provided the type of vehicle Mercer needed to create the mobile comm center he envisioned. It would be small but mighty.

     "This," says Mercer, "is the truck you park behind the pretty truck to make it work."

     Mercer worked with others at MedStarOne to come up with worst-case scenarios likely to happen during a disaster. He envisioned a truck he could drive anywhere and plug into any radio system-kind of like a big universal remote control. In emergency communications world, it's called interoperability, and Mercer wanted to seamlessly connect any radio system imaginable.

     Anyone in emergency services knows the biggest problem in a disaster is usually the lack of good communications, not only among emergency services, but also with the public. "One of the things we've found happens in an emergency," Mercer says, "is that people go to Wal-Mart and buy all the Family Radio Service (FRS) radios in the store."

     Along with other emergency responders, Mercer wanted to be able to talk to those public-owned radios. Indeed, he wanted to be able to tie those radios into an emergency response network if he needed to multiply the number of units on the ground. He needed to be able to talk to the FRS radios, those on 800 MHz trunk systems, those on typical VHF systems and those on digital.

     Not only that, Mercer wanted them all to be able to talk to each other. If a police officer on an 800MHz trunk system needed to talk to a volunteer search team on an FRS unit, Mercer wanted the officer to only have to key the microphone and talk.

     In order to create that interoperability, Mercer filled MedStarOne's truck with several different types of radios. It has VHF, UHF and 800 MHz. Computers in the truck provide the ability to reprogram radios or clone portable units. With the ability to program radios on-scene, Mercer can park his truck at a site and program his on-board systems to talk to the units on the ground in just minutes.

     Programming radios to replicate systems can be limited, however. "If it's a trunking system that's multisite, we can't reproduce that," says Mercer. To be truly universal, there had to be a way to plug one radio into another and let them talk.

     The solution Mercer found was the Incident Commanders' Radio Interface (ICRI), a portable interoperability device from Communications-Applied Technology (C-AT).

     When Mercer told C-AT founder and president Seth Leyman what he wanted to do, Leyman had the answer. "It evolved out of work we were doing in Boston," says Leyman of the ICRI. "If all the infrastructure disappears, there was no obvious solution for interoperability."

     In order to bridge the gap, C-AT created a device that could connect multiple radios and telephones and run for more than 30 hours on what Leyman calls "a handful of batteries" (specifically eight AAs). Leyman says the unit is so intuitively easy to set up, the instructions are printed on the top of the box.

     The ICRI can interconnect almost every type of radio or telephone system, even VOIP. It can create talk groups, and it can bridge encrypted radio systems.

     Unlike COR (carrier-operated relay) or COS (carrier-operated signal or switch) systems, the ICRI uses a VOX system created specifically for it. Leyman says that's the secret to keeping power usage down. "There are people who are fascinated by touchscreens," says Leyman, "but this unit is designed for ruggedness."

     Mercer was skeptical when he heard Leyman's claims. "I wanted to see one break," he says. Then he received a unit in the mail and patched it together with three different radio systems. He took a radio home to see if it would continue working. "It stopped working, and I thought Aha!," Mercer recalls. As it turns out, the unit had been inadvertently unplugged in his office.

     Now, "I've been amazed by the thing," he says. "We can make the radio in a military helicopter talk to the EMS unit."

     Besides the ICRI, MedStarOne's communications truck has the ability to be on the road within minutes of a call. It can start working in transit and doesn't have to raise a tower, although it can. Two satellite dishes provide Internet access once on scene, and a WiFi network can be set up around the truck. Once it's on scene, Mercer says, the truck can operate independently for up to seven days.

     "All they have to do," he says, "is tell us where to park."

Rod Brouhard is a paramedic for American Medical Response in Modesto, CA, and former director of the EMS program at Modesto Junior College.