Military radios hold promise for civilian disaster response.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, several helicopters were sent to pluck one of the storm's victims from the same New Orleans rooftop. Because emergency workers couldn't communicate with each other, survivors in other locations were left waiting.

It's the kind of problem that often occurs in the chaos of natural disasters, including last month's Topanga fire, which drew firefighters from 50 departments. There, the Santa Ana winds shifted and sent flames into areas considered safe just moments before.

"We've got to have radio interoperability," said Kevin Nida, a fire captain and president of the California Association of Firefighters. "In wildland fires, the wind can shift and the fire can come toward a crew that was initially safe. It comes up every time."

That's why law enforcement and emergency officials are closely watching a military radio being developed by a local Boeing Co. unit.

First responders hope that the radio, being designed for military purposes at Boeing's Strategic Systems unit in Anaheim, can be adapted for civilian use. Boeing engineers just completed the first working Joint Tactical Radio System, which will be delivered to the Army in January for field tests.

The military is building the radios as part of its drive toward "net-centric warfare," which allows various levels of communication among satellites, ground, air and sea forces and the command center.

The new radios use software to transmit encrypted voice, video and data in information packets--much the way the Internet transmits digital data. They also allow users to scan for and grab any radio frequency being broadcast, instead of being locked into one channel.

At $270,000 per unit, the models developed for the military are far too expensive for state and local agencies to afford, even with increased federal funding from the Department of Homeland Security.

"The real question is whether there is a way to leverage the technology developed for JTRS for a product that would meet public safety requirements at a price point they can afford," said Fred Frantz, director of law enforcement programs at L-3 Communications Government Services Inc. in Chantilly, Va. (The L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. unit is working on a different phase of the JTRS project.)

"In the next year or so, we'll be looking into whether it is feasible to come up with a stripped-down variant, without all the military specifications," said Frantz.

Boeing Integrated Defense Systems is lead contractor for the $856 million contract to develop the technology, and eventually provide more than 20,000 of the 84 pound radios. Depending on the number of units produced, the work could total $15.6 billion.

The program ran into trouble over the summer, and the military warned it might cancel the contract. But engineers and military personnel at Boeing's Anaheim labs and in the field at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., made the prototype radios talk to each other and to current military radios over 14 miles in desert conditions.

For now, the contract is still in place but it is being restructured.

Boeing is working with the government to prepare a plan for going forward with the project, said company spokesman Jerry Drelling via e-mail. "We and our teammates take very seriously our responsibility to resolve these concerns."

Stopgap methods have been adapted to link police, fire and other emergency personnel at low cost. Radios now in use by police and fire departments cost $1,500 to $3,000 per unit; a typical small city police department needs a couple of hundred units, according to Frantz.

L-3 built hardware that acts as a "patch," basically picking up one radio signal and rebroadcasting it on other frequencies. The system, funded by the Department of Justice, allows 20 local and federal law enforcement agencies in the Washington, D.C. area to talk over different frequencies with almost no loss of sound quality, and was installed at around $150,000.

Other patches have been used by public safety officials for years. During an emergency with more than one fire or law enforcement agency responding, a system rebroadcasts voice transmissions on different frequencies so agencies can talk to each other.

Los Angeles County emergency services have four patch systems and the city of L.A. has seven, all built by Raytheon JPS Communications, a division of Waltham, Mass.-based defense contractor Raytheon Co. The patches are relatively inexpensive and accomplish the basic goal of radio interoperability.

They have other problems, though, such as too many voices on the same network, according to Nida. During the Metrolink accident in January, the channels were so busy that patching them would have crashed the system. "For that incident we needed less radio traffic and more face-to-face communication," said Nida. "At that point, the interoperability is almost as bad a problem as not having any."