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Running a TETRA system or P25 trunking system without our tools, we say, is like trying to fly a 747 without instruments”, warned Phil Burks, on the Genesis stand at the recent BAPCO public safety communications exhibition in London. For those who might prefer a car dashboard analogy, he enlarged a little: “You can drive your car without it, but you have no idea when you are going to run out of gas. We tell you on your TETRA network or your P25 network when you are running out of resources because we actually show ‘busies’.” On the big screen was a dynamic map of a mobile radio network in the state of Illinois, its base stations coded in green, yellow or red according to their current level of activity. “See, that’s business popping up right there!”, Phil exclaimed, as another dot turned red. “It’s saturated because they can’t get on the site. And that means that I need to add resources – channels, or whatever. “And not only are we showing all this live but we are storing it all behind the scenes. So you can come back afterwards and do forensic analysis to say, OK, so what caused that? Is it true that I need more resources? Or was a channel down? Was there a data problem with the connectivity to that site? “So you can actually go back and figure out what you need to do.” Call attempts Using the Genesis tools, he explained, the network operator can generate a variety of reports to reveal – for example – all busy periods over a one-month period, so that he can distinguish random traffic peaks from recurring congestion. “All of that is made up of individual push-to-talks”, Phil continued. “From the data we receive through the Motorola Dimetra network, the Motorola P25 network... we can keep track of every push-to-talk, every emergency, every private call – every single little call attempt.” Audit trail Besides providing performance data for the network operator, the software can supply an audit trail for the user when needed.“Let’s say you are at an event where there’s a shooting. You’ve pressed your emergency button, but you say nobody responded to you. We can absolutely go back and prove every piece of the event – the timings – to show whether you did or did not press your emergency button. You may have thought that you pressed it. Whatever! We have all the pieces of the puzzle in very minute detail.” The Genesis software was born of Phil’s own experience as a private radio operator in the US. With nine networks to manage, he taught himself to program so that he could write some simple billing software. But from there he went on to develop graphing tools that could chart the busy periods and traffic bottlenecks in his systems. “I said, ‘I’m going to draw and arbitrary line here which only 10 per cent of my highest users are above. Then I’m going to talk to each of them and say: ‘Here’s one of two things that are going to happen: I’ll need to start charging you for airtime usage, or you find a way to shorten your conversations – use 10-codes, other things.’ “The bottom line was they started limiting their conversations. So those heavy users came down and it allowed me to put more radios on, to make more fixed revenue.” Chasing the baddies By capturing and retaining full data about activity on the network, the software enables the operator to provide an improved service for customers. It can identify radios which are not being used, it can help in locating lost radios and it can catch people using cloned radios. “It doesn’t happen on TETRA, but on P25 it absolutely does”, Phil Burks explained. “Because I can clone your ID and put it on a different talk group, I’m good to go. It’s a problem because the owner of the network is losing airtime.” And he cited an example, a tow-truck company in Texas. “He cloned 200 radios for his buddies and was selling them airtime on the county system – and they never knew it. And we showed it to them. They sent the Feds up there and shut him down, fined him and did a bunch of other stuff.” To deal with this kind of mischief, Genesis has a ‘clone watch’ feature which monitors the radios for activity implying an ‘impossible drive distance’ between successive transmissions. The software can also identify radios which fail to de-affiliate from the network. “They just go below the radar, and thus they are sitting there, listening to conversations going on in talkgroups”, Phil said. “If you suspect, we can do a report real quick and show you who’s active and who’s not been active for a period of time. We did it for one of our large clients over here and found three radios that were just sitting there, listening to what was going on, on a pretty important talk group.
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