Friday fragments - comms news from around the web for 13 February 2015

A round-up of the week's critical communications and public safety radio news for Friday, 13 February 2015.

ACMA seizes, destroys radios. A Sydney man has been fined $3000 and ordered to forfeit valuable radio equipment that he had been using to make overpowered transmissions. The defendant pleaded guilty to two charges of unlawful possession of a radiocommunications device under the Radiocommunications Act 1992.

Sepura adds senior roles. Sepura has announced the formation of two new roles that it says will help further enhance its growing global systems capability. John Whitcomb joins as Business Development Manager for Sepura's systems business in North and Central Europe and Vince Edwards as DMR Proposals Systems Engineer with global responsibilities.

French senate questions 700 MHz auction. French lawmakers are concerned about the proposed timetable for transferring 700 MHz spectrum from broadcast services to mobile services. MPEG-2 is due to be switched off by April 2016, and many TV viewers do not have, or will not by then have, TVs capable of receiving MPEG-4.

GD radios quadruple available channels. General Dynamics' four-channel digital modular radios (DMR), used by the US Navy, are being upgraded with HF dynamic routing (HFDR) software to turn the radio's four channels into eight virtual channels. In addition to HFDR, the new HF virtual channel exploitation software expands the DMR's capacity to 16 virtual channels when operating in the HF line-of-sight and UHF satellite communications frequencies.

Metro radios still failing. On 12 January, smoked filled a tunnel of the Washington Metro, leading to one death and dozens of injuries. Poor comms between below- and above-ground responders have been cited as a contributing factor to the length of time it took rescuers to arrive. Now, it has emerged that there have been 10 radio failures in the weeks since. The mayor has ordered radios to be tested every week, instead of the usual monthly cycle