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Looking to the Sky for Communication Solutions

Keeping lines of communication open during an emergency is critical. Satellites have been indispensable to that end in Missouri.

EM_missouri satellite trailer
Emergency teams in Missouri often look to the sky for signs of storms and danger. In an area where floods, tornadoes and even earthquakes are a vey real threat, the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) needed an emergency communications network that would not be subject to terrestrial outages. It was then that the people of Missouri looked to the sky for their best solution: customizable satellite infrastructure.

Sitting on the New Madrid fault line, Missouri has long been preparing for “the big one” — a monster earthquake that scientists say is far overdue that has the potential to completely wipe out roads, power and most critical communication. John Diggs, traffic communications coordinator for the MoDOT and previously a self-proclaimed “satellite hater,” envisioned a solution but needed to find the right partners to customize a system to meet the department’s very specific needs. That’s when he turned to Spacenet Inc. and Orbital Data Net (ODN) to help design an emergency communication system that could mitigate the damage from a disaster, such as a catastrophic earthquake.

But MoDOT was skeptical about the use of satellites for its communication systems because of the poor performance of its previous system. “They were using a broadband product that would be fine for Web browsing, but as soon as you started using the voice or radio applications, the sound quality was so terrible that you couldn’t make out what the other person was saying,” said Neal Nystrom, Spacenet’s lead engineer. After many trials and test runs with the new system, Nystrom and Greg Heifner of ODN successfully convinced Diggs that the customized platform would fit all of MoDOT’s needs and have the sound quality he was looking for.

Another obstacle MoDOT had to overcome was the hesitation of some agencies to exchange information, even when technologically they were able to. “It’s not so much a personnel problem, but a personal problem,” Diggs said. “There are hundreds of vendors that will sell you the technology to make interoperability work. The biggest challenge we faced with interoperability was getting other agencies to share information.” After working with different agencies both within the state and elsewhere, MoDOT was able to reach agreements with many agencies to get them to push information through its new satellite system, which could then be allocated to other users.

In the end, Spacenet, ODN and MoDOT developed a satellite system that used less bandwidth, was more efficient and less expensive to operate. They successfully integrated the satellite, trailers that house equipment, trucks, three staging areas and six towers into the existing system for approximately $1.3 million. The project took about four years to fully deploy and now covers about 98 percent of the state.

“I’ve gone from being a huge satellite skeptic to their biggest evangelist almost overnight,” Diggs said.

Another useful feature of the new system is its ability to connect seamlessly with the systems of other agencies, or “connecting the army green gear to the civilian black gear,” Diggs said. From the highway patrol and fire department to hospitals and the military, agencies from all over the state are able to connect to MoDOT using their satellite system.

After a short period of testing on simulated emergencies, the new satellite system was put to the test in its first real deployment in an emergency situation. The town of Clarksville faced an emergency when the Mississippi River overflowed its banks and threatened numerous homes and businesses. According to Diggs, the new system did everything promised: offered enough power and communications connectivity to handle all the Internet, radio and phone traffic required by first responders from multiple jurisdictions across the state.

“One of the real components to making this project a success was working with the right partners,” Nystrom said. “Understanding the customer’s needs and being able to customize the system helped to keep MoDOT on budget and come up with something that specifically met their needs.”
 
[Photo courtesy of the Missouri Department of Transportation.]

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