Police officers, firefighters, and emergency medical professionals keep us safe and secure day and night. Our firm is proud, therefore, that we can serve this highly valued group of professionals to help make their job safer and more efficient.

Learned over the course of 30 years fulfilling the needs of hundreds of public safety agencies large and small across the USA, we have come to know that first responders deserve a consulting engineering firm that stands “shoulder to shoulder” with them…not as mere “technocrats” that focus on technology as the answer to all problems but rather as a trusted partner who sees technology as only one element of a total solution set. Stories in local newspapers, TV, and the Internet routinely report of public safety agencies wrestling with good technology somehow “gone bad” – compelling many to return to their legacy systems, some that might be 20 or 30 years old, that worked for them rather than struggle to live with a new technology that clearly doesn’t. There are a multitude of firms available today advertising that they can engineer technology to fix any public safety need. But, can they design a unique solution that works for your public safety needs? Do they have a history of spending the time to understand how your public safety operation does business now and, oftentimes more importantly, how you want to do business in the future?

Macro’s field-proven system analysis and engineering processes help ensure public safety agencies avoid becoming the next newspaper story by taking a multidisciplinary approach to technology.

Our staff’s education, experience, skills, and processes look at technology from all angles…not only from the viewpoint of operational suitability but also from usability, maintainability, scalability, and longevity. In other words, by looking at technology as an answer rather than simply as the answer to public safety’s needs, our methodologies promise to identify for first responders the most reliable and cost effective technologies available and then help integrate them into their operations on time and on budget.

Our practitioners who work closely with public safety have operational experience in law enforcement, dispatching/call-taking, and emergency response, or are drawn from technical and managerial leadership positions they previously held with some of the most recognizable and pioneering companies in wireless communications and public safety technologies such as Motorola, M/A-Com, Harris, IPC/Orbacom and GTE. Accordingly, we are able to deliver a complete, highly flexible spectrum of independent engineering and project support services:

• Technology strategic planning
• Business process review
• User needs assessment
• Interference / Intermodulation analysis
• Power density evaluation (OET-65)
• Conceptual system design
• Project budgeting/life-cycle costing
• FCC and other licensing-related services (e.g. Interference management / mitigation, narrowbanding, refarming, 800 MHz rebanding, AWS/2 GHz migration.)
• Project justification
• Grant application support
• Request for Proposal (RFP) and specification preparation
• Proposal evaluation, scoring, and selection
• upplier negotiations and contract formation
• Quality assurance / contract compliance oversight
• Project management
• Training and system cutover plans
• Configuration control
• Final system acceptance verification  

We have extensive experience performing these services throughout the project life cycle to help ensure our public safety clients introduce new technologies and business process improvements that will help better protect our country’s police officers, firefighters, and EMS personnel.


Our planning, engineering, and project management work for the public safety sector focuses on the following technology areas…

Interoperable Wireless Communications Statewide, regional, and municipal public safety land mobile radio VHF, UHF, T-Band, 700/800/900 MHz Conventional solutions and protocols such as CTCSS, VIDA™ IP) Trunked solutions and protocols such as ASTRO P25™, OpenSky™ IP, LTR™) Wide-area interconnect networks: Point-to-point digital microwave Fiber optic networks (OC3 to OC192) Leased services Specialty 2.4, 4.9 and 5.8 GHz short-haul links Interoperability Solutions Gateways (e.g. ACU-1000™, NetworkFirst™, SmartLink™) Mutual aid Cross-patch/cross-band APCO Project 25 CAI standardization RF & microwave frequency search, coordination, and licensing support Wide-area mobile data high-speed / broadband networks Public carriers operating 1x-RTT/EV-DO, GPRS/EDGE/3G, AWS, etc. Private networks (e.g. aggregated 700 MHz)

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Dispatch Centers • Computer Aided-Dispatch (CAD) • Records Management Systems (RMS) • Mobile Data Computers (MDC) • Field Reporting (FR) • Mobile Command Post • Voice logging recorder & archival systems • Geographic Information Systems (GIS)/AVL/Mapping • Dispatch consolidation/collocation • Business Process Reengineering

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Facilities • Tower site selection, design, permitting, and development • Critical power • Communication equipment shelters/enclosures • Tower structural analysis • Site audits (e.g. R56, OSHA Standard 1910.308) • Dispatch centers/public safety answer points (PSAPs) • Emergency operations centers (EOCs) • Survivability/redundancy/continuity of operations • Disaster recovery (DR)

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