The CREST emergency-radio system has lots of friends, but it still doesn鈥檛 get any love from the Victoria police department. CREST is hoping $13 million in upgrades will win over VicPD.
Victorians should hope so, too, because more than popularity is on the line.
Last week, Victoria Police Chief Jamie Graham described CREST as a 鈥渄angerous radio system鈥� because it has dead spots that leave his officers without communication. It鈥檚 a description that disturbs CREST general manager Gord Horth, who says it is hitting 97 per cent reliability. 鈥淣o radio system gives 100 per cent coverage.鈥� He understands, however, that 97 per cent is meaningless to a police officer who is calling urgently for backup on a radio that鈥檚 as silent as a brick. Horth says they take any communication failure seriously, and investigate all of them.
The problem is the concrete jungle of downtown Victoria. The system鈥檚 VHF radios can transmit and receive over long distances, but VHF doesn鈥檛 do a good job of penetrating concrete and steel.
The dead spots were more common when the $17-million system was built in 2003. Upgrades in 2008 and 2009 worth $10 million filled in some of the blanks, but not enough to satisfy Graham and his officers.
Where trouble spots can be identified in big developments, CREST installs a bidirectional amplifier inside the building to boost the signal.
Still, because of the uncertainty, VicPD has taken to putting two officers in patrol cars to provide backup in case of a radio failure, an obviously expensive alternative. And one that鈥檚 not necessary in Saanich, where radio penetration is reliable, and one-officer cars are the norm.
Horth has high hopes for the latest upgrades because the federal government has set aside radio spectrum at 700 MHz for public-safety communications, and CREST will install equipment that uses 700 MHz in Victoria, Saanich, Oak Bay and Esquimalt. The radio waves at 700 MHz are better able to penetrate concrete and steel.
The VHF gear from the core will be moved to the outlying areas to improve coverage.
CREST鈥檚 priorities are capacity, coverage and audio quality, Horth says. Capacity means the system can handle all the traffic from the 49 agencies that use it, and coverage means finding and fixing any dead spots.
He expects audio quality will improve with the conversion to full digital service. Fire departments had said 鈥渘o thanks鈥� to digital radios the last time they were offered because older digital units performed worse than analog at often-noisy fire scenes.
The new digital systems have noise-cancelling capabilities that make them better than analog when background noise is present.
Horth says 48 of the 49 agencies are satisfied with the system. The test of that satisfaction will be early next year, when CREST goes to the municipalities asking for more money. Each will have to pay about two per cent per year more over four of five years.
Two potential problems are obvious. Will councils in the outlying areas, where CREST works well, want to pay more for improvements they don鈥檛 need? Most importantly, will Victoria and its police department be persuaded that the 700-MHz conversion is the solution?
The second will likely be the harder sell. Some Victoria councillors made it clear they also have grave misgivings the system.
CREST enables emergency workers to talk to each other when it counts, and that saves lives. Scrapping it would be a costly undertaking with no guarantee of getting something better. But making it more reliable in downtown Victoria has to be the priority. A three per cent failure rate is an annoyance on a routine noise complaint. It鈥檚 unacceptable when someone鈥檚 life is on the line.
