By Jacob Quinn Sanders
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — North Little Rock police Capt. Leonard Montgomery isn’t yet quite sure how this will work.
Beginning in March, he must find a way to reprogram every one of the department’s 400-plus radios, taking them out of service even as officers provide protection to the city 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
But it’s not just him. Any agency that uses Little Rock’s emergency communications radio network — a list that includes police and fire departments, buses, hospitals, ambulances and city agencies like public works — must reprogram each of the thousands of radios in use to comply with a federal mandate.
“Of course, this means a lot of work,” Montgomery said with a grin of knowing understatement. The first phase — and perhaps the simplest — is just coming to a close. The first meeting for the agencies was last month, and all agreed to begin work finding and counting its radios.
The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, for instance, just finished an inventory of each of its handheld, desk and car radios.
“We’re still in the formation stage of turning over all our information,” said Ron Crane, the school’s emergency preparedness manager.
Montgomery has yet to begin getting a solid count.
“I’m sort of hoping they still have the spreadsheet I started 11 years ago to track all our radios, but I doubt it,” he said.
For an entity like the Central Arkansas Transit Authority, the reprogramming is easier because its buses and streetcars are idle for a portion of the night, stowed and out of service. Contract technicians can come in and reprogram radios then.
But Crane said that while he was unconcerned about the logistics, he wasn’t yet sure how reprogramming his radios would need to coincide with the same effort by the medical-emergency helicopters and Metropolitan Emergency Management Services ambulances that hospital workers talk to regularly.
Montgomery was more blunt. “If it doesn’t work, all you’ve got is a brick that does you no good whatsoever,” he said. “I don’t want that to happen. No one does.” All this is necessary because of the way Nextel — since absorbed by Sprint into Sprint Nextel — grew as a wireless communications provider in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Beginning as a two-way radio provider, Nextel acquired increasingly large portions of the radio-frequency spectrum as it moved into cell phones and digital voice and data service.
But the location of that spectrum — in the 800-megahertz range — sits close enough to space traditionally occupied by law-enforcement agencies across the country that the cell phone signals began to interfere with emergency communications. At one point, for instance, frequencies at 824 MHz belonged to lawenforcement while 825 MHz was a cell-phone frequency.
The problems — which meant that a Pennsylvania officer could not talk over the radio to backup 100 yards away during a fiery car crash or that an Oregon officer facing a knife-wielding suicidal suspect outside his own department could not radio inside for help — never were reported in Arkansas.
In late 2001, Nextel offered in writing to the Federal Communications Commission to place $500 million in an escrow fund to help pay for law-enforcement agencies to switch frequencies. The FCC instead negotiated with Nextel, settling in 2004 on an offer of new spectrum for Nextel worth $4.8 billion if Nextel would abandon a spectrum worth $2.2 billion.
“The difference we agreed to pay back to the U.S. Treasury,” Sprint Nextel spokesman Scott Sloat said. “Out of that, we are paying for departments across the country on a piece-by-piece basis to make the change after they submit plans to us.” The FCC then ordered emergency communications networks all over the nation to switch to new frequencies. The first frequency swaps began in 2005.
Sprint Nextel also agreed to pay to swap out radios that could not make the switch.
In Little Rock, which first received notice of the coming change in 2006, the project means programming four new “control channels” into every radio. Those are the channels that essentially ensure the right agencies and the right people talk to each other and that conversations stay intact.
The four old control channels will remain until every radio is programmed with the new ones and there have been several tests, said Laura Martin, Little Rock’s 911 communications manager. Once those tests have been successful, every radio will have to be reprogrammed a second time to remove the original, defunct channels.
In context, Little Rock’s $1.5 million project is small. In Washington, D.C., for example, officials had to coordinate the frequency switch with myriad federal agencies, local governments and two states, Sloat said.
“But that doesn’t mean this is easy or that we can afford to get something wrong,” Martin said. “That’s not an option for us. This has to be the most awesome strategic plan I’ve come across to ensure that there is no interruption in service.” For Montgomery in North Little Rock, it means twice coordinating 182 people to find times they might not need their radios — which they take home — and their work vehicles, all while keeping officers and command staff informed and safe.
“Yeah, this is going to be fun,” Montgomery said. “It’s going to be real interesting.”