M/A-Com wins two Denver public safety deals

The city of Denver has awarded M/A-Com Inc. a pair of contracts to improve its public safety radio system and to provide replacement parts and additional radios.

M/A-Com of Lowell, Mass., received a $10.5 million contract to implement a multisite, digital, simulcast radio system on top of the city's single-site radio system. The improvements to Denver's Enhanced Digital Access Communications System will give radio users reliable communications within buildings throughout the metropolitan area.

Portable radio users have had trouble communicating on systems from within buildings in high-density urban areas. The improvements to Denver's system should alleviate such problems, M/A-Com said.

The new six-site radio system will work through an M/A-Com Internet Protocol-based network system, NetworkFirst, to link together disparate radio systems on the Colorado Statewide Digital Trunked Radio system. Linking the disparate systems will let officials communicate with each other regardless of which radio they are using or on which frequency they are operating, M/A-Com said.

Denver's police, fire, emergency medical services and other public safety organizations will use the new radio system.

M/A-Com also was awarded a five-year, $14.5 million contract to supply replacement parts and additional mobile and portable radios to first responders in the Denver metropolitan area.

M/A-Com is a unit of Tyco Electronics Corp., one of five business segments of Tyco International Ltd., Princeton, N.J. The parent company has more than 250,000 employees and had annual sales of about $40 billion in fiscal 2005.