86 radios Manasas surplus sale

[Mike ODELL]

my semi-retired brother is in the Public Safety biz as a dispatcher (and League Area Manager for
Oklahoma) and the stories the tells about MOT's descent into the Seventh Ring of Hell are really
depressing. They have pedaled the 800MHz trunked radio systems to everyone far and wide and
both the architecture and implementation of that system is simply terrifying. The new State Highway
Patrol ops center in his home town (ribbon cutting today!) does not have any external antennas
and certainly not a tower. their entire radio access for the shiny new 800-trunked system is
through telco circuits out to towers 10 to 40 miles distant. the vehicles all have 800-trunked
but also have lo-VHF and hi-VHF for car-2-car but the repeaters and towers for those systems
we're removed with installation of 800-trunked. As you are probably aware, Oklahoma is given
to weather episodes which rip the holy shit out of telco infrastructure, so a couple of command centers
have already lost radio access a couple of times. Worse, the entire OKC regional system went into
complete congestive collapse during the two Moore tornadoes and a couple of other times as well.
This, of course, is the system pushed by DHS to provide "regional coordination of first responders".

During the whole 9/11 aftermath, every time some high-placed moron would opine about how 
"every radio must be able to talk to every other radio" I would scream at the TV about his
utter cluelessness.  this is what happens when morons with absolutely ZERO operational
experience and even less theoretical understanding of reality start dictating policy objectives. 
that and "it must never happen again!"
that one makes me even crazier. 

I was on a panel post-Katrina with Dave Farber and a couple of other Certified Smart Guys,
the purpose of which was to talk about "how to prevent comms failures like those 
seen in Katrina from ever happening again".  The audience was a size able gaggle of
very senior Hill staffers and even a couple of real Congresscritters from the Katrina impact area. 

When it came my turn, I told them they had the problem statement wrong. The problem was not 
how to prevent it because nothing build by man has ever survived the determined efforts of Nature.
A more useful question is how do we design technology and systems which fail in ways leaving
us the most re-usable parts with which to dig our way out of the hole. 

Much of the current technology
is incredibly brittle; one little chink and the windshield explodes in a shower of glass pieces unusable
for anything except sweeping up. The switched PSTN requires a LOT of stuff to work right just to
make a local call, much of it having almost nothing to do with making a local call. Self-healing technologies
like dynamically routed packet networks need a lot less help to work, and they reconstitute whatever
is left working trying to do something useful. This is why the first phone calls from the New Orleans
Mayor were made using POTS phones and Internet VOIP terminal adapters acquired after the New Orleans
CIO brought his VOIP adapter from home to the hotel where they still had Internet service and he verified
it would work. That's when HizzHonor sent the Police to bust open that Staples everyone saw on TV
and grab all the VOIP boxes off the store shelves.

The hotel's Internet service was still working because the necessary gear in the Telco colo space
was up high with the fiber transmission gear, high enough to not get drowned and the gensets
we're up there too. (God Bless the implacably cranky old Bell Plant Engineering people who insisted on
doing that shit right.)

that was an interesting day, especially the part where the staffers were trying to wrap their heads around
the idea that just because Congress passes a bill, the laws of nature will not just toe the line and change
for their convenience, and that no amount of begging and pleading will matter at all. 
My parting shot was that's the real definition of The Real World and is the reality us engineers
had to deal with every hour of every day.

     -mo




Sent from my iPad so please excuse the jammy fingers.

> On Aug 13, 2014, at 12:03 PM, Alex Fraser <beatnic at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> I think they are 800 MHz digital.   I'm not bidding.  I'm recovering from dashed high hopes of having a wood/metal band saw, went for twice what I was willing to pay. 
> Life in the fast lane...
> http://www.publicsurplus.com/sms/auction/view?auc=1185217
> -- 
>    \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\-----++++*0*++++-----//////////////////
>        No electrons were harmed in the creation of this message
>          --------------------------------------------------------
>  ~~~********************Alex Fraser********************~~~
>          --------------------------------------------------------
> [[[[[[~~^^^#___=>>>```/\/\**O**/\/\```<<<=___#^^^~~]]]]]]
> _______________________________________________
> Tacos mailing list
> Tacos at amrad.org
> https://amrad.org/mailman/listinfo/tacos
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://amrad.org/pipermail/tacos/attachments/20140813/9cbbf727/attachment-0001.html>