BPA overhauls its radio communication system

It’s easy to take for granted cell phones and communications technology we use every day. At least, until you find yourself somewhere without signal, for instance while hiking the Olympic National Forest or trekking across Mt. Hood.

For Bonneville Power Administration Transmission Line Maintenance employees, losing a signal and getting cut off from team members not only slows down their work, it’s also a safety concern. Cell phones aren’t always reliable when crews are crossing the countryside. Yet, it’s critical to have a dependable communications system to efficiently address outages and respond to emergencies. 

“Commercial telephone and cell phone companies aren’t going to build cell towers where there aren’t many customers,” said Michael Street, engineer, Transmission Network and Support Engineering. “This creates a challenge when BPA does work in rural or mountainous areas.”

The agency’s Mobile Radio Essential Data Infrastructure team is working to address those challenges by upgrading 100 existing BPA radio sites and building more. This will fill in coverage and integrate radio upgrades with the agency’s digital communications fiber optic backbone. BPA is also on track to replace more than 1,000 radios  in work vehicles and issuing another 1,000 portable radios to lineworkers. The new radios will work on the legacy and new systems as the upgrades occur across the region during the next three years.

The overhaul will give field crews better tools to keep them safe while maintaining the agency’s 15,000 miles of transmission lines in the Pacific Northwest.

On and off-grid communications solutions

BPA will add 14 new repeaters in areas where BPA already has some existing communications infrastructure. A repeater is equipment that fills the gap in dead zones by taking the signal from one tower and repeating it so it can reach the next tower. This is similar to an internet router booster that expands the range of your connection. Adding new repeaters at these sites is relatively inexpensive and provides new coverage in much-needed areas. But just like your connection at home, if you don’t have power in your home, there’s no internet to boost. So for BPA’s service territory that doesn’t have communications infrastructure and power sources, the agency had to find an off-grid solution.

Engineers first looked at Hall Ridge, a radio repeater station in the Cascade mountain range overlooking Detroit Lake, Oregon. This station served BPA for decades until a power failure in 2012 made the station inoperable until 2016, when BPA engineers considered using solar and battery power to bring communications back to the dead zone.

One of Bonneville’s innovators is Bryan Donaldson, Power System Control engineer for the Salem district, who oversees a wide variety of maintenance work for communication devices such as radio, fiber, routers and phones. After extensive research, Donaldson and others found that the U.S. Forest Service’s practices aligned best with BPA’s needs.

“The Forest Service, which has hundreds of off-grid sites, uses a particular type of radio site that is designed for very low power consumption while in standby mode,” said Donaldson. “A typical BPA radio site is always transmitting data and that consumes a lot of power. A cross-band repeater doesn’t transmit unless it’s being used. Reconfiguring the Hall Ridge, as well as any future sites, into a cross-band repeater means it uses very little energy about 99% of the time.”

In 2017, Donaldson added solar panels and an upgraded battery to test new radios at Hall Ridge. And it worked. The rest of the upgrades to complete that project will be done as early as this summer.

From start to finish, a conventional solution costs almost $4 million, which includes a new building, equipment, running power to the site, and heating the facility. BPA’s design for an off-grid radio site modeled after Hall Ridge is projected to cost as little as $300,000.

Mobile repeater unit extends coverage when and where crews need it most

Radio towers need a direct path to successfully transmit signals to an end-user’s radio. This is why you see communication towers perched atop hills and mountains. However, there are dead zones in canyons and the further you get from the radio tower, the harder it is to get a clear signal.

“You can’t talk through dirt,” explained Street. “If a crew is in a ravine, they can’t access a radio tower so one person stays on a hill above the work area to relay verbal requests to de-energize or re-energize the line from the crew to transmission dispatchers. One of the drawbacks to this old solution is the person calling dispatch can’t join their crew to do the work, making the job take longer.” 

To solve this issue, BPA designed a transportable repeater to act as the intermediary at the top of the ravine between the crew in the dead zone and the nearby radio tower. A version of this coverage extender was successfully deployed and used during the fire season 2020 to support crews doing emergency restoration near Cougar Dam in the Willamette Valley.

Now, Bonneville is fielding two different configurations of the extender. One will be built into cases that load in the back of a small SUV, and the other will be built into a small trailer and hauled behind a vehicle. The equipment will be ready this summer, which overlaps with fire season.  

Upgrades will be complete in 2024

Preliminary work on this massive communications overhaul began in 2012 and the project is expected to be complete by 2024. The upgrades will boost BPA maintenance and emergency personnel’s ability to operate at least 24 hours without commercial power from anywhere in Bonneville’s service territory. 

“Even in an age where everybody has a cell phone, mobile radio systems are still widely used by police and fire agencies and some private companies,” said Donaldson. “Radios will continue to be vital to BPA and to the linemen who tell us it’s their number one safety tool.”

The teams making it happen

It takes a village to adequately revamp and run BPA’s communications infrastructure program.

There are several Mobile REDI teams supporting the Mobile REDI Program, a multi-year, multi-project effort to replace the aging BPA mobile radio infrastructure with a simple, modern system with enhanced features. Read the full list of team members for the Hall Ridge Off-Grid Solution and Transportable Repeater teams.  You can also learn more about the Mobile REDI program and other teams by reading Team profile: Meet Transmission’s Mobile REDI team.