Friday fragments — critical comms snippets for 1 April

A round-up of the week’s critical communications and public safety radio news for Friday, 1 April 2016.

Comms Connect Wellington coming up. In association with the Radio Frequency Users Association of New Zealand, WF Media (publisher of Critical Comms magazine and this newsletter) will stage the first ever Comms Connect in the land of the long white cloud, on 14 and 15 April in Wellington. It should be a great opportunity to meet and greet comms users and vendors from across Australasia. Make sure you come along if you can. Full details here.

Iran DXpedition. A couple of weeks ago we brought you news of DX voyages to Heard Island and Madagascar. This week, it’s Iran, with the EP2A DXpedition about to get underway. The team aims to set up and communicate from the province of Gilan from 16 to 25 April. Full details here.

FirstNet and NG911. If you want a good overview of the status of the FirstNet project in the US, plus moves towards that country’s Next Generation 911 service, David Silverberg’s recent article at GovTechWorks is a good starting place.

Rugged smartphones trial. The US city of Shaumburg is putting Sonim rugged smartphone technology to the test. The XP7 Android smartphones operating on a commercial LTE network are purpose-built for PTT, and are equipped with Enterprise Secure Chat (ESChat) PTT application from SLA Corporation, which provides secure and encrypted one-to-one private PTT calls, ad hoc one-to-many PTT calls, as well as group calls.