Friday fragments - comms news from around the web for 11 July 2014

A round-up of the week's critical communications and public safety radio news for Friday, 11 July 2014.

911 and police radio went quiet when power failed. A failure of both the primary and backup electrical power resulted in a Washington, DC, Unified Communications Centre going off the air for a few minutes. According to the Washington Post, there were longer-than-normal wait times on 911 calls and police radio was 'severely impacted' for 5 minutes.

Frequencies set aside to warn of attacks. Broadcasting networks in Jerusalem, Israel, set aside several FM frequencies at the beginning of the week for the sole use of broadcasting alarm sirens in case of rocket attacks.

Telecom NZ becomes Spark. Telecom New Zealand will change its name to Spark on 8 August in a move the company says “better represents what we are today - it is all about mobile data, online entertainment, cloud services, the Internet of Things or whatever new technology is around the corner".

Troopers still unhappy. Nebraskan state police officers have withdrawn their grievances over a radio system they said is unreliable, after those grievances became public and officials got involved. But they still have concerns. They say the system failed during a standoff in June 2012, when they were forced to rely on personal mobile phones and runners with messages.

Hams and medicos exercise together. In an exercise to simulate disruption to normal communications, amateur radio operators stationed at hospitals and other medical facilities used their gear to send sitreps to the local public health disaster operations centre. The exercise was a great success; around 35 hams participated.

Alaskan research radio array gets reprieve. A US Air Force antenna array that beams HF signals into the ionosphere for research purposes, and which was scheduled for demolition, might now be transferred to a research institution. The US$290m High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program facility will now be safe until May 2015.

Why your radio room needs a good lock on the door. A group of kids broke into a Western Australian community radio station last month and proceeded to run amok, performing their own impromptu broadcasts complete with expletives. The station operators have decided to see the funny side of it all and hope the kids might have a future in radio.

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