Local & Over-the-Horizon Communications Support and Evaluation

The annual Gasparilla festival in Tampa, Florida, is a Mardi Gras-like event that takes place during most of the month of January, involving hundreds of private and public events and several large-scale parades.  As such, the City of Tampa 's police, emergency and communications services must make a maximum effort to maintain order and citizen safety during this period.  This prolonged period of large public events and crowd control and makes Gasparilla an excellent ‘laboratory' for testing disaster-response technologies.  For the 2006 Gasparilla festival, as a demonstration of post-disaster communications, the Department of Homeland Security asked the FP/ER Lab to provide stand-alone telephone and internet services to the Tampa Police Department and the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Department, plus supplementary internet service to the city's Operations Center located in the Tampa Convention Center .  Although the FP/ER had less than three weeks to assemble and test the necessary equipment, Lab personnel were able to successfully provide all of the requested services, including a mobile satellite earth station in a van.  The tie-in to the Operations Center was accomplished with a closed-net 802.11a-based wireless relay system from the roof of the Convention Center to the roof of a nearby grocery store, and then on to the communications van.  All FP/ER-provided services and systems functioned perfectly.