Friday fragments - comms news from around the web for 7 November 2014

A round-up of the week's critical communications and public safety radio news for Friday, 7 November 2014.

Paging system doesn't work. Volunteer firefighters in Sullivan, Wisconsin, are having trouble with the paging system that alerts them to fires. Some pages are getting through, others aren't; instances have occurred where, with two firefighters standing next to each other, one receives a page and the other doesn't. “I have never seen a more poorly run communications system. This is terrifying as a firefighter," volunteer firefighter Randy McHugh told Fox6Now.com.

Duress button system doesn't work. West Midlands Police officers in the UK are having trouble with the GPS functionality of their radios. In one instance, an officer in the town of Erdington hit his duress button; the system showed him as being in Blackpool, 200 kilometres away. The GPS glitch is putting lives at risk, say officers. “It all boils down to cost with the force expecting to have its funding cut by tens of millions of pounds in the next few years," one anonymous officer told the Birmingham Mail. “Over the last few years we have been forced to take down some radio masts to save money, but that does compromise the system's GPS abilities. The GPS signal is supposed to automatically refresh every five minutes but, in some cases, the slightest signal interference makes it appear at base that the officer is stationary. In one case the interference was coming from something as innocuous as a shop's automatic door."

Russian milcomsat launched. A Soyuz rocket carried a Russian military communications satellite into orbit on 30 October. The Meridian satellites link Russian ground, air and naval forces and command centres in the Arctic, Siberia and the North Sea.

Hams, military in joint exercise. US Army and Air Force branches of the Military Auxiliary Radio System (MARS) conducted a communications exercise where the scenario included major disruption to normal communications channels. The MARS units also had to reach as many amateur radio operators as possible across the US