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GCN Home > 10/09/06 issue

Tool puts radio assets on the map

GCN Agency Award | Survey and mapping system closes communications gap

By Patience Wait, GCN Staff

Ever since the attacks of Sept. 11, one problem that has dogged first responders at all levels of government is the lack of interoperable communications.

But a tool developed at the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center-San Diego is being used to tackle the problem—not by spending a lot of money on new equipment and trying to figure out who gets priority allocation of scarce resources, but by tracking the equipment already out there and identifying how it all fits together.

The Communication Assets and Survey Mapping (CASM) tool is an online database and visual display that provides information on communications equipment and identifies both existing interoperable pathways and where the gaps fall among local, state and federal first responders. It comprises two Web-based components: one for collecting data and one for displaying it.

Katrina test

The Homeland Security Department gave the tool its first test in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The Interoperable Communications Technical Assistance Program (ICTAP), based at SPAWAR-San Diego, started gathering communication assets data for New Orleans in July 2005. After the hurricane passed through the area at the end of August, CASM was the only readily available source of information on antenna locations. As agencies throughout the country assembled to support recovery efforts, New Orleans used CASM to augment surviving paper records to restore emergency communications.

CASM was so useful that when Hurricane Wilma approached the Florida coast in October, Nancy Dzoba, head of the Florida Regional Domestic Security Task Force-Region Seven, in Miami, requested access to the information that had been collected for CASM in her region. (Although it’s a shared database, each region that contributes information is also the only authority that can grant access to its data.) Dzoba also received access to the information for the Tampa and Orlando regions, which serve as mutual aid partners in the state.

“The database saved us valuable hours of technical research,” Dzoba said. Due in no small part to the valuable hours that the development team put into stitching together the system.

“The way CASM initially started was out of necessity,” said Bob Ryder, the ICTAP technology tools manager who led the development program. “We had to collect data for land mobile radios.”

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Defense IT, Geospatial, Homeland Security, IT Management, State & Local, Management



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