We recently had the opportunity to interview Korey Hess, a Radio Technician at Spectrum Communications, and gathered his thoughts about D3M and the two-way radio industry. We talked about the tool, new features and more. See the full interview below.
How long have you been working with two-way radios?
6 years with Spectrum Communications. I have a diploma in Electronics Engineering Technician and another one in Electronics Engineering Technology from Fanshawe College.
What do your daily activities entail?
You could break it down evenly into radio programming, network design, staging the systems or site diagrams on D3M, and sometimes we’re even standing on top of a tower installing an antenna. For the most part, I work in the London area, but we’re pretty much all over Southwestern Ontario.
Prior to D3M, what tools were you and your dealership using to design and document two-way radio networks?
I was using Visio, but our main technician that did most of the drawings [for Spectrum Communications] was using Corel Draw.
How does D3M compare to other tools you’ve used in the past?
Since D3M is made specifically for the radio industry it’s a lot easier. Having ready-made icons available and being able to simply add the descriptions fields to them.
How has your organization implemented D3M into the process of creating and managing your radio network projects?
Mostly myself and Ryan [a field service technician at Spectrum Communications] are using D3M. Up until this point, we have been retrofitting drawings of systems we already have and any new systems we create, we instantly put them into D3M. So far our process has been us building the system, then doing the drawing afterwards. This will likely be reversed in the future.
What is the most significant benefit of using D3M?
Being able to see a whole system right in front of you. It makes it a lot easier to understand how everything works together. Being able to visualize an entire system.
What do you like best about D3M?
The ease to be able to manipulate everything as you go. Having an endless pane to work in - it’s an infinite piece of paper that you can make it as big or as little as you want and have all the information in one place instead of having to go from page, to page, to page.
What do you find most frustrating about D3M?
I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but maybe it would be the organization where all the projects are listed [projects page]. We have a few offices so it was kind of hard to find your projects, and what’s important to the London tech. With the recent revision of adding and assigning an office location to the project, it has let you filter the projects.
If you were to review D3M what score would you give it out of 10?
For this type of business [two-way radios], I would give it an 8 out of 10 at this point.
Would you recommend D3M to a friend in the industry?
Yes, 100%. I’d be interested in knowing what other people are using. Are people still stuck using old technology? I’d recommend D3M to anybody.
Please finish this sentence in 25 words or less… “D3M has been beneficial to Spectrum because…”
It allows all of our technicians to see a system visually using pictures & icons and being able to troubleshoot and document from the diagrams.