Last week, May 12-13, the IEEE held a conference on Homeland Security technologies in Waltham, MA. Eric Ramsey, a former Project54 employee, was presenting a paper related to his master’s thesis on the development of a Project25 data radio basestation. I went down to accompany him for the 2nd day of the conference and view some of the other presentations on Homeland Security technologies.

During the opening talks of the day, it was immediately apparent that this was not a gritty engineering conference, but instead more of an business-oriented affair, discussing the industry that has grown up around Homeland Security rather than the gory details of the technologies themselves. This put Eric’s presentation a little out of place as it was a very detailed engineering breakdown of his work, but it didn’t seem like he lost anyone as people asked intelligent questions and were more than willing to discuss the topic with us afterward!

Here is Eric presenting:

The presentations which particularly interested Eric and I, since we are both involved (or were at one point, in the case of Eric) in the Project25 basestation project at Project54, were those concerning radio interoperability. We saw many different takes on how to solve the problem of facilitating better bandwith and channel usage, allocation, and communication in general between public safety organizations. From creative (in terms of today’s standards) radio policy management to satellite-based communications (rather than LMR), to shifting bandwidth to the 700MHz band (formerly occupied by analog television) to improving the radios themselves, there are a lot of little pieces to the puzzle! We even saw a presentation from a fellow NIJ COMTEC fundee, Nancy Jesuale.

On a side note, one of the professors here at the UNH ECE Department, Andrzej Rucinski, was co-chair of a session at the conference. Unfortunately, the session ran at the same time as Eric’s presentation, so we were unable to head over and say “hi”.

The conference was a great experience - I hadn’t been to one since the Network Security conference I attended a few years back in Boston, and this one was just as interesting. It’s always nice to take a step back from your own work and check out what other people in the field are doing! Radio interoperability is a huge undertaking, and it’s great to see so many smart people working on the problem!

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