The United States Fire Administration (USFA) has completed a project with the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) to study what important areas of safety and technology discussed in the USFA manual Fire Department Communications Manual - A Basic Guide to System Concepts and Equipment (FA-160) needed to be updated or revised, as well as what topics and technology related to fire department communications not discussed in the manual needed to be added since its development in 1996. This joint USFA and IAFF study was conducted with support from the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) SAFECOM Program Office.

"The need for an understanding of today's modern communications concepts and technology for firefighter and citizen life safety and operational effectiveness remains as valid, if not more so today, than it did when this USFA document was first produced in 1996,” said U.S. Fire Administrator Greg Cade. "USFA was pleased to work with DHS SAFECOM and the IAFF on this study to provide critical information to the fire service."

The new manual, Voice Radio Communications Guide for the Fire Service, provides updated information on communications technology and discusses critical homeland security issues and concepts, such as SAFECOM, that did not exist when the original manual was first published. It also provides a wide fire service audience with a minimum level of familiarity with basic communications issues such as hardware, policy and procedures, and human interface.

“The safety of both firefighters and citizens depends on reliable, functional communication tools that work in the harshest and most hostile of environments.”
- General President Harold Schaitberger, International Association of Fire Fighters

"The safety of both firefighters and citizens depends on reliable, functional communication tools that work in the harshest and most hostile of environments," said IAFF General President Harold Schaitberger. "The IAFF was pleased to work with USFA on this important project."

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This is a really excellent document, full of good, accurate information. However, I think we should go a step further:

We are not civil engineers, but we have to have a firm working knowledge of hydraulics
We are not automotive engineers, but we have to know trucks and how they act.
We are not chemists, nuclear physicists, or Biologists, but we need a firm basis in these sciences to deal with hazmat.

We are not communications engineers, but most of us pick up a very advance and complicated piece of communications equipment that operates through a complex system and expect it to do things that it is not designed to do.

Therefore I suggest that we all need a ciriculum for Awareness, Operations, and Communications Officer like we have graduated courses of study for our other disciplines.

As a communications professional in my private sector side, I work to help my guys understand the physics of radio on a basic level, so that they can understand why radios act the way that they do. I'm afraid that many Chief Officers feel that they are radio system designers, to their peril. But I don't know any radio system designers who think that they are Fire Chiefs.

I think that using this document as a beginning, that there should be a course of study that takes firefighters and officers to the next level, not so that they can become system designers, but rather so that they can make decisions and evaluate what they need for their departments more accurately....and so that they can know enough to kick salesman pretenders to the curb when they feed us baloney.

Just my two cents....let the flames begin.

Greg Carttar
You're right someone should devolope a new manual for disipline for all new rookies they should all have to follow the manual that you are talking about and i stand by that everything in you're paragraph in 110% correct and true to all firefighters

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