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NLECTC Completes P25 Interoperability Tests of 7 Subscriber Units (6/26/09)
The National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center (NLECTC) Communications Technologies Center of Excellence (COE) and Etherstack completed functional testing of seven different Project 25 (P25) subscriber units on a two-site, trunked and conventional P25 network installed in Cape May County, N.J.

The COE tested subscriber units from EF Johnson Technologies, Harris, Icom, Kenwood Communications, Relm Wireless, Tait and Vertex Standard. “We found a high level of interoperability for calls among the units, including emergency calls,” said Ed Vea, the COE’s project manager. “We tested encrypted calls, unit-to-unit calls, and group calls in both conventional and trunked modes, and of course, multisite operation in the trunked mode.

The network is composed of repeaters from Kenwood, Tait and a third manufacturer with Etherstack’s P25 RFSS network controller application running on a Cisco 2811 AXP router tying it together.

“The COE is tasked under its agreement with the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) to support the federal government’s goal of ensuring interoperability to state and local public safety,” said Rick Mulvihill, director of the COE. “We were thrilled with the results of the interoperability testing. Now we’re gearing up to test newly introduced multiband radios.”

Nathan Coates, Etherstack’s project manager, said the company plans to test some common elements of a network such as consoles and voice recorders, which will connect to Etherstack soft switched infrastructure via P25’s Console Subsystem Interface (CSSI). “We’ve been testing these components in our labs and feel it’s time to put them on a live network to let users experience them,” Coates said.

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