WHAT’S YOUR FREQUENCY?
STUDENT TRANSPORTERS HAVE A HOST OF CAPABILITIES AT THEIR FINGERTIPS WITH DIGITAL RADIO TECHNOLOGY, NOT TO MENTION PEACE OF MIND
WRITTEN BY RYAN GRAY D
igital radios versus analog radios. Which is better? Te question should be: Which solution best
fits a school district’s transportation communications needs?
As with most aspects of student
transportation, the name of the radio game is increased efficiency, access to new features, enhanced safety and security, and improved, more reliable communication between dispatch and drivers. Digital affords all of that. Lake Worth ISD completed its
digital-radio upgrade last summer in its 31 school buses, which Transpor- tation Supervisor Carla Dodd said was “fairly easy” because the district simply upgraded from an existing analog system. “It really wasn’t a challenge for us,
because we were already using Mo- torola radios,” said Dodd, who over- sees the transportation of between 1,800 and 2,000 students a day at the district, which is about an hour drive southwest of Frisco, Texas, the site of last month’s Transporting Students with Special Needs and Preschoolers National Conference. “We just need- ed to move to the digital phase.” For Lake Worth, that need was
predicated on finding a solution to challenging dead spots near one of the district’s middle-school campuses that sits in a low-lying section of the 11-square-mile service area. Yes, Dodd joked, there are some valleys in North Texas, albeit small ones. Te district already had one repeater located near the high school. “We had just a couple of little
46 School Transportation News April 2013
areas where we did not have coverage, so we just added a repeater to that part of town. We didn’t change, we didn’t add, we didn’t go from one extreme to the other,” she continued. “We already had a system in place and just did a minor upgrade. It was really simple; it did cost us a lot of money because we needed all new radios. But other than that, we were already installed.” Dodd said the district wanted the clearer communica-
tions afforded by digital radios, an improvement over the previous analog system, plus the new installs brought the district into compliance with the FCC’s narrowbanding requirement. In an analog versus digital comparison, all things being equal (e.g. the antenna height, transmitter output power, etc.) the radio signals will travel the same distance, said Mark Crosby, president and CEO of the Enterprise Wireless Alliance. However, the reception of an analog system will gradually get worse as a bus nears the perimeter of the coverage area. In a digital system, the reception will not worsen but will end abruptly when the receiver can no longer decipher the digital code. "In other words, the digital signal is clearer, longer,"
Crosby said.
DIGITAL COMPLIANCE During last year’s countdown to the Jan.1 imple- mentation of the FCC narrowbanding requirement, many school bus operators not only found themselves scrambling to attain compliance with the mandate, they also were grappling with decisions on whether or not to
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60