No more listening in on police calls

Charlottetown Police Services has a new radio system that members of the public cannot hear with scanner radios.

As of Jan. 1, the department is using a new radio from Motorola, part of what the company calls the MOTOTRBO line.

It transmits on the same frequency as the city used in the past, but uses a form of digital modulation called time division multiple access or TDMA, rather than FM or AM techniques. A scanner will just hear a deep buzzing sound on the frequency in use.

“We are testing out some new digital radios,” says Gary McGuigan, deputy chief of operations with the department. “Right now we are just testing them, for how long I’m not sure.”

^{Picture: Guardian photo by Nigel Armstrong}

^{Gary McGuigan, deputy chief of operaitons with Charlottetown Police Services, holds up a new digital radio now being tested by officers. The new signal cannot be deciphered by scanner radios used by the public.}

The department is bearing the full cost of this change.

“It comes down to an officer safety issue,” said McGuigan. “We have to have the ability to reach our officers and for them to reach us.

“We had some issues with the old (radios). I’m not sure how old they are but they are old analog radios. There have been some spots in the city that are dead zones because the system is getting older and we have had some repeater difficulties.”

He said like everything, the new ones are digital.

New scanner radios available to the general public, even if they are digital models, do not have the software to decode this kind of signal.

“That is the problem, I guess not for us, but for them, when we go from analog to digital,” said McGuigan. “(The public) is no longer able to scan them.”

He said that sometimes the department did get helpful tips from people listening in with scanner radios, but there was also the opposite effect.

“Sometimes you had to be careful because of confidentiality issues, sensitive information that you didn’t want going out over the airways,” said McGuigan. “It worked both ways.”

He said that technology has a way of keeping up and now there is a way that the city police department’s new radio signal can be taken from a modified, or hacked, scanner and fed into a computer system that may be able to output a synthetic voice imitation of what is being broadcast.

“It is going to be harder to do because more and more police stations are moving to computer assisted dispatch system where dispatches may go right from a computer at dispatch to a computer that is in the car.”

The RCMP on P.E.I. have that kind of computer system now, but not Charlottetown Police Services. That is likely to change in the next few years, said McGuigan.

The new radios being tested now by the city will serve the department in the interim until a completely new digital radio system is brought on line in all three Maritime provinces, likely in 2014.

“All three provinces are still at the table and they are looking at getting that system up and going,” said McGuigan.

“Our issues is, right now we have a system (that) has some issues with it,” he said. “We are just trying to find a system that will bridge us to 2014 and then buy into this new system.”

Source: www.theguardian.pe.ca