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communication in high rise

Hello everyone,

in your departement what are the solutions to solves the problems of communication with your portable radio. I'm still looking for solutions for my Dept. on this topic.

thanks for the time you will take to help me

LT MARTIN GUILBAULT
MONTREAL FD

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Glenn Paley on June 18, 2009 at 11:19am

Our department is requiring all new high rise buildings to install Radiax cable from top to bottom (usually down the elevator shaft). This cable is essentially leaky co-ax cable which greatly assists the travel of a radio signal in a high rise building. This solution obviously does not help in older buildings which are not equipped with Radiax cable. The other thing that comes to mind is to ensure that you are operating on a simplex channel (radio to radio) when inside a high rise. Up untill recently our firefighters were not taught to switch to a simplex channel so many of them were using a duplex channel (signal goes through a repeater) and this was causing communication problems in high rises. They have now been taught to switch to a simplex channel whenever they are in a high rise building and this has improved communications in the older buildings not equipped with Radiax cable.

Permalink Reply by MARTIN GUILBAULT on June 19, 2009 at 12:11pm

thanks for the tip of the Radiax cable. Yes we are using simplex channel, even with simplex we're still having problems. Do you use portable repeater on your interventions?

Glenn Paley said:

Our department is requiring all new high rise buildings to install Radiax cable from top to bottom (usually down the elevator shaft). This cable is essentially leaky co-ax cable which greatly assists the travel of a radio signal in a high rise building. This solution obviously does not help in older buildings which are not equipped with Radiax cable. The other thing that comes to mind is to ensure that you are operating on a simplex channel (radio to radio) when inside a high rise. Up untill recently our firefighters were not taught to switch to a simplex channel so many of them were using a duplex channel (signal goes through a repeater) and this was causing communication problems in high rises. They have now been taught to switch to a simplex channel whenever they are in a high rise building and this has improved communications in the older buildings not equipped with Radiax cable.

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