Adaptive, Effective, and Efficient: The SHIELD EXTEND Public Safety DAS in the Field

Nextivity’s SHIELD EXTEND Public Safety DAS delivers superior coverage and can be easily adapted to any circumstances with through the WAVE Pro app. This is not just talk, either: Nextivity’s technicians have experience with finding solutions to client problems in the field.

During an acceptance check for a Nextivity SHIELD EXTEND public safety DAS that was installed in a high school in a suburb of Phoenix, AZ, the local AHJ (Authority Having Jurisdiction), in this case a fire department inspector, found that the signal received from the system was 15dB too strong. To troubleshoot and optimize the performance of their public safety DAS, Nextivity sent a pair of technicians to the location to inspect the system and find a solution.

The field technicians overseeing the system test immediately got to work, even checking in with the cloud calculations three times to make sure that they were correct. Everything seemed to be in place, and with the Public Safety DAS freshly updated, the second test began.

Despite all their rigor, the test failed again, as the system continued to produce a signal 15dB too strong. The technicians were stumped. The day prior they had checked the installation package and made sure the system’s deployment values were within the range of what the client needed. Everything seemed like it should have simply worked. That is, until one of them asked the AHJ a very important question.

The Nextivity field technicians asked the AHJ about their tower configuration, since they had not been informed about its specifications beforehand and were informed that it contained something called a Tower Mounted Amplifier. This Tower Mounted Amplifier had provided gain, boosting the strength of signals. How much did this amplifier increase the gain by?

15dB.

With just a short, five-minute recalibration via the WAVE Pro app, the SHIELD EXTEND system was doing everything the AHJ wanted it to do. All it took was a simple adjustment by one of the technicians to turn down the uplink power by 15 dBm. The SHIELD EXTEND system even continued to function within a 2dB window of the exact goal within every point of the school the AHJ tested. Both the AHJ and the integrator were highly satisfied with the outcome, the former because the SHIELD EXTEND system had the best performance he had ever seen for a public safety DAS, and the latter because it was so easy to make adjustments to the system in the field.

Nextivity SHIELD EXTEND Public Safety DAS has been developed to solve for all common DAS pain points and deliver reliable coverage.  In this case, even the AHJ’s specific goals for the SHIELD EXTEND could be met within a mere five-minute on-site adjustment, much to his approval. All throughout the school, coverage was a guarantee. In the event of an emergency, there would be no difficulty communicating from any location within the school to any other and the system would always be within the exact range that the AHJ would like it to be.