Project Profile: SECURE SIRENS

PROJECT PROFILE: Secure Sirens

We recently completed a really interesting project in Oklahoma City, and I wanted to share the story; this will take a minute...

My first job out of college was as a lab-rat for Mitel, the darling of the telcom world at the time. I had the honor of doing a special project for Terry Matthews (that's SIR Terry now to you commoners...) and he sponsored me for a patent in DTMF applications engineering, of which Mitel was a world leader silicon-wise, slaying all competitors with their 8870 decoder that made it possible for you to doff that rotary phone; long sentence and true story.

Well, 40-odd years later I had the distinct honor of working on a migration of that DTMF technology to P25 AES encryption for the penultimate life-critical application: Tornado Sirens in OKC.

I used Mitel's 8870 chip to assess/integrate/optimize over 5,000,000 test digits to prove viability. I was lucky enough to be invited to OKC by our old collegue Jim Morris (that's Dr. Morris now to you commoners...) to assist turning this up.

It took a while, (ok, a career) but it was so awesome to see it all come together. A thousand thanks to the L3Harris and Whelen teams who made this work, and to Dr. Morris and the great team in OKC for making this possible.

So, anyone who's going to IWCE, please drop in and see our friends at Whelen (booth 1636) and ask about the L3Harris P25 AES Encryption option.