Composed of wireless gateways and basestations, the NetworkFirst system interconnects municipal police, fire department, hospital and ambulance radios (which typically operate on different frequencies). Radio interoperability is cited by the U.S. government as the "magic bullet" in homeland security, the system that might have prevented the tragic communications breakdowns of Sept. 11, according to Dennis Martinez, director of MA/COM's "open-sky" interoperability project.

The system is built on voice gateways that capture and digitize voice transmissions, and route them as Internet Protocol packets to designated receivers, Martinez said. The multiband gateways are capable of capturing signals in a variety of frequency bands used by municipal police and fire departments These include VHF (30-50 MHz) and UHF (150-174 MHz) police bands, fire departments using spectra near 450 MHz and public safety systems operating in various slots about 800 MHz.

Once captured and digitized, the signals are processed by a Sun server at a regional operations center and routed by Cisco equipment. A digital-to-analog converter and radio transceiver completes the link.

M/A-COM believes this is the first product to truly deliver on the promise of full-scale interoperability for public safety radio systems — and one that makes use of legacy equipment. The RF Gateway is available in two chassis models supporting up to 12 legacy radio channels, trunked talk groups or console positions. A single regional operations center enables up to 64,000 NetworkFirst talk groups (though the installation price is in thousands of dollars per radio channel).