Thank you for taking the time to visit our site. As a consultant with nearly 30 years of experience as a practitioner in both wildland and all-hazards emergency communications, I see again and again the problems that arise from lack of training on both radio hardware and tactical practices at the first responder level. But, I’m not talking about normal day-to-day and mutual aid responses. That is seldom a problem and the typical 30 minutes of radio training a probie gets during their academy might be all they need. Where this breaks down is when you have something well beyond the scope of most responder’s experience. I’ll speak for Colorado when I refer to Columbine, Aurora Theater, Marshall Fire and many other events that rapidly exceeded the capacity and capability of local responders. But, unfortunately, you can likely recall an event (enter incident name here) much closer to where you live, where it significantly impacted you, your department and your community. Most agencies don’t usually incorporate regular training with their radios, so when the crisis happens, radio discipline is compromised and getting users to successfully navigate what is arguably one of the most important pieces of PPE quickly impacts a safe operating environment.

A major reason why "communications failures" are frequently among the top three items listed at any After Action Review (AAR) is because we haven't fully incorporated these lessons yet as well as we could. I joke that all I want to hear at the next AAR is that communications didn’t suck :-). It doesn’t serve our profession or our communities to have to lower the bar that far. Given our recent collective response to the Marshall Fire in Boulder County, CO, we have come a long way but we still have a long way to go before we can ever claim that emergency wireless communications isn’t a challenge.

We can help. Our focus is on helping you find the best way to make your communications tools work for you and your responders, be it two-way radio, cell phones, sat phones, FirstNet, or cans and string. We look for actionable items that can address critical gaps in both the technical and the human elements that interfere with an effective response when we get outside our comfort zones, lose situational awareness and negatively impact one of the most important tasks, and that is the ability to safely maintain “mission-critical” ops.

So what can we offer you? We are nationally recognized consultants and Subject Matter Experts (SME) in emergency communications and our objective is to help you make the best choices for you and your agency. Our response-centric, pointy-end-of-the-spear public safety communications experience informs us on how we can best support you and your agency. We look forward to helping you to increase the chances of having positive results with technology, training and practical usage. We look forward to helping you to have consistent, safe and effective communications on every call from routine to the overwhelming crisis. We look forward to the chance to help you.

Program / Support / Install / Repair

First Responder Communications offers a range of support services, including vendor selection, project management, radio programming, technical support, repairs and local equipment installations.

Our commitment is to the responder on the street or in the field that demands top performance when it’s needed most, be it a firefight, a gunfight or a coding patient. Our 27 years of personal, front-line responder experience informs us on how we can start to help you get what is most appropriate for your task and then to support it well throughout its life cycle.

Consult / Plan / Train

As a company, we are nationally recognized Subject Matter Experts (SME) in emergency communications. Our consulting services are focused on federal, state and local agency-level policy needs as well as helping you find the best hardware solutions from a vendor-agnostic approach that delivers the best experience for you and your stakeholders. Our planning services concentrate on helping you develop easily executable, day-to-day channel templates and then build standing, large event communications plans ready for seamless implementation at the front end of a crisis. Our training services cover not only user-focused basic radio training and effective interoperability practices, but can also teach your support staff to learn programming software and to obtain things like P25 Advanced System Keys covering many of the major brands.

Brands We Trust

When looking for products to support your mission, isn’t a gizmo just a gizmo? Well, perhaps one brand can be just as good as another and in the right hands and with the proper training and support, any device designed for your mission can work. After years in the radio communications business, we kinda know where the bodies are buried. However, our mantra is integrity first. We do as we say, deliver as we promise to the best of our ability and support the heck out of you, our customer. We support brands that are not only of the highest quality and technically fit to the task, but fairly priced as well. Our objective is to always deliver the best value possible and we actually do give a damn about delivering a great customer experience. We’re not perfect, but try harder every day to make good on our commitments and to exceed your expectations whenever possible.