Friday fragments — critical comms snippets for 30 October 2015

Critical communications and public safety radio news for Friday, 30 October 2015.

LMR market research. A new research report from MRRSE covers the worldwide LMR market for the period 2014–20, offering “a competitive analysis of dominant companies in the market along with high-level analysis including value chain, Porter’s five forces model and market attractiveness analysis”. It covers military, commercial, construction, transportation and other markets.

Poles to poles. The US House of Reps this week held a hearing on the topic of ‘Breaking Down Barriers to Broadband Infrastructure Deployment’. The aim was to discuss proposals that “would streamline processes for getting access to federal lands and utility poles, require smart dig-once policies that take advantage of existing roadwork to deploy fiber conduit and examine the bureaucracy that impedes private sector investment in broadband”.

Protecting base stations. The US FCC has issued an interesting notice calling for comment on approaches to define Wireless Protection Zones around grandfathered 3650–3700 MHz base stations, which are entitled to protection from harmful interference from Citizens Broadband stations.

Benefits of FirstNet. Here’s an interesting video that features Washington State (US) Adjutant General Bret Daugherty talking about whether FirstNet capabilities would have been of use during the 2014 Oso mudslide, which killed 43 people.

Methanol fuel cells. We hadn’t heard of this kind of thing before. German company KEYMILE is promoting a methanol fuel cell power generator for providing uninterrupted power supply to mission-critical communications networks.

Indoor location finding. EF Johnson Technologies and NextNav LLC say they have successfully integrated EFJohnson’s Viking P25 radio with the indoor location capabilities of NextNav’s Metropolitan Beacon System (MBS), providing public safety-grade, wide-area indoor and vertical location capabilities. They say MBS provides an innovative “terrestrial constellation”, which brings GPS-like performance to indoor and urban environments where satellite-based positioning is either unavailable or significantly degraded.