Your coaches may need cell phone amps

By Sondra Sneed

Roughly 36 critical minutes ticked by before a passing motorist, who came upon the fresh wreckage of a motorcoach near Mexican Hat, Utah, on Jan. 6, 2008, reported the crash to authorities.

Emergency help was badly needed that overcast night when 50 of the 53 passengers in the coach were ejected from their seats when the bus careened off an embankment, spun around, rolled completely over, struck a bed of rocks, had its roof torn away, and finally came to rest in a ditch on its wheels.

Nine people were killed, and 44 others, including the driver, suffered minor to serious injury, according to a National Transportation Safety Board investigation of the tragedy. All survivors required medical treatment.

Could there have been lives saved if it hadn't taken so long to get a call out?

While fatigue, speeding and delayed response by the driver were established by the NTSB as the cause of the crash, the time it took to actually call for help was the result of no cell phone service in the remote area. The first ambulance did not arrive until roughly an hour after the crash.

Poor cellular coverage is a common issue that safety and rescue professionals, as well as highway patrol teams, who work in rural areas across the country face on a regular basis. And they aren't the only ones with the safety problem.

After the Mexican Hat crash, the NTSB developed seven recommendations to help avoid similar events in the future. One of those recommendations calls for the installation of cellular amplifiers in buses and motorcoaches that travel rural roadways.

The San Juan County (Utah) sheriff's office, which investigated the crash, along with local search and rescue teams, quickly adopted that "safety measure."

"We installed cellular amplifiers in our vehicles," said San Juan County, Sheriff Mike Lacy. "I'm a retired highway patrolman and only once, 25 years ago, have I seen a bus accident with as much carnage as that one," he said in a recent interview.

The sheriff's department installed cellular amplifiers that are made by Wilson Electronics, and Lacy said the amps have made a significant difference in their cell phone range on roadways. Wilson was specifically footnoted as a supplier of amplifiers in the NTSB report on the Mexican Hat crash.

As suppliers of amplifiers for fleet vehicles and municipalities,

Wilson Electronics is the largest and oldest cell-phone amplifier manufacturer in North America, having gotten started 40 years ago manufacturing antennas for CB radios. The company is headquartered in St. George, Utah, which is nestled in a remote area that is affected by poor cell service.

While cell phones make up the bulk of mobile communications today, problems with cell phone coverage continue to haunt rural and mountainous regions.

Walt Brooks, Wilson's director of sales, said that "remoteness" is just one factor in creating weak signals. Major cities can have problems with what he calls "urban canyons," where concrete-and-steel buildings create barriers for cell-phone signals.

Cellular amplifiers, also called repeaters, provide a boost to and from cell towers, he said. This allows the cell tower and the phone to actually find and "talk" to one another.

Wilsons SoHo model is described by Brooks as "a great fit for a bus." The unit is "dual-band, so it will work with all carriers, (except Nextel's iDen)," he said. "The SoHo is strong enough to provide good coverage and its intelligent design prevents it from being too strong."

In other words, like all Wilson amplifiers, it has the ability "to cutback power and prevent oscillation."

Oscillation is a phenomenon that occurs when an antenna and an amplifier are too close together. It is similar to the affect of a microphone thats too close to its amplifier; most of us have experienced that ear-splitting event. The feedback loop in oscillation, however, is serious enough to be a threat to the integrity of a carriers network.

Wilson Electronics is the only manufacturer of cellular amplifiers that has established FCC-approved standards for this technology. More information about the companys products and customer service can be found at www.wilsonelectronics.com.

No one can know for sure if lives would have been saved in Mexican Hat had an emergency call been possible sooner. But there are reasons to believe that if the technology is made available, roadway communications now has a back-up plan.

Sondra Sneed is the editor and senior writer for a wireless trade publication. She regularly contributes wireless technology articles to various trade and consumer publications. Contact her at sondra@sondrasneed.com.