On The West Coast

Of The United States

In The Southwest

Region of the State of

California

Centered in the City of

San Diego

And high above the intersection of the 8 and

163 Freeways

Is the home of a unique communications site located above the University of California, San Diego, Medical Center, Hillcrest

The purpose for this report is to evaluate the present circumstance of the University of California Medical Center Communications Site (UCSDMCS) in relation to the present tenants, the quality of the existing installations, the site layout and future growth potential, the quest for additional tenants, the impact of pricing structures to maintain tenancy and the need for qualified site management.

INTRODUCTION

A high security, restricted access, roof with pre-installed antenna support systems and sufficient electrical and cooling systems to support a large communications tenancy provides the ideal location for centralized mobile and microwave installations.

The Medical Center, because of its unique location, stands as a man-made mountain

looking down on Mission Valley with a 360 degree

view to the horizon, located on the Hillcrest

mesa.

The University of California Medical Center Communications Site (UCSDMCS) is located on the twelfth floor of the main medical center building at 225 Dickenson Avenue, adjacent to the main medical entrance at 200 West Arbor Drive, San Diego 92103, in the area of the City known as Hillcrest.

LOCATION

The geographical coordinates are centered at or about [ 32-45-17.2 N, 117-09-57.1 W ]. The building is at an elevation of ninety-one (91) meters AMSL (above mean sea level) and the roof is twenty-seven (27) meters AGL (above ground level).

The FCC Universal Licensing System database currently shows a total of eighty-nine frequencies licensed to the geographic location occupied by the Medical Center (Appendix D).

Many of these frequencies are licensed to a single piece of equipment providing for redundancy with frequency agile hardware or are part of some wideband microwave backbone.

Some of these frequencies were previously licensed and, then, more recent equipment with newly licensed frequencies replaced the older equipment with the old license still on record, but the equipment deactivated.

Because of the prominent location and building height, the UCSDMCS provides a site that is well suited to act as a microwave relay hub, broadcast transmitter site, ITV site, and wireless and networking cell operations.

All of these types of users will appreciate the facilities and will be prepared for a lease arrangement with costs and clauses that are different from a simple two-way radio user.

PERSONALITY

The floor space can support a maximum of eighteen (18) relay type racks and there are currently eleven (11) rack installations in place. The space around the equipment racks is on the low side of what is required by OSHA, but is quite typical of that found at an un-manned communication facility. Clearly the room for growth and additional revenue is limited.

The UCSDMCS currently has approximately two-hundred-fifty square feet of space available to be used by tenants. The existing cable trays limit rack height to about ninety (90) inches.

An engineer from TCG made two site visits to the UCSDMCS to evaluate the equipment installations, layout and supporting hardware for antennas, feed lines, and grounding systems.

INSPECTION

A plan view CAD drawing is included as Appendix E showing the layout of the communications room and the equipment placement. The site inspection showed that the electrical outlet distribution and cable tray facilities are sufficient for the tenants with individual electrical services to each tenant providing load center isolation and power distribution spreading.

Transmission lines were, for the most part, neatly dressed and grounded, with some of the systems including surge protection on the heliax/coax. Most of the installations of individual tenants followed good engineering and physical practices. There are a couple of tenants whose installation practices are substandard and require rework.

A site manager should be assigned to track the tenants during negotiations and set guidelines for installation both within the equipment room(s) and on the roof structures for the antennas and supporting transmission line chase ways at the time of installation. Annual and semi-annual inspections should be part of site manager and maintenance responsibilities.

Currently, the UCSDMCS is out of balance. By out of balance we mean that the roof structure can support far more antennae and support equipment than can be housed within the twelfth-floor communications room. Wireless tenants are often well equipped to provide their own equipment structures for rooftop installation, thereby eliminating this obstacle. Most users, on the other hand, usually require an indoor equipment room with a controlled environment.

This site will be nearly at max capacity except for those tenants that choose to construct outside the twelfth floor communications room. Options include allocating space on floors above the twelfth floor, within the elevator and cooling facilities rooms, or constructing an additional equipment room structure on the roof.

If, however, there is not sufficient interest in expanding the communications site because of lack of tenant interest, limits on environmental resources or electrical capacity, there would be no reason to make any changes in the site as it stands today.

The UCSDMED Communications Site (UCSDMCS) and the supporting roof antenna structures are valuable and unique assets. This facility is and will be utilized by those customers that appreciate the value of the site for their business needs primarily because of its location and superior electromagnetic view in all directions. However, many of the potential tenants within the communications industry will make site-based decisions using price-fee considerations and may find the UCSDMCS to be too costly to occupy.

VALUE

Many of the small communications site users will be discouraged from leasing this site if it is seen to be largely outside the ‘going rate’ of other sites. Again, the UCSDMCS is a limited and unique resource. At a cheaper rate the site will fill quickly and the revenue will rapidly reach its upper limit. At a higher rate the site will remain largely vacant and the pro-rated operational costs will be proportionally higher to the existing tenants. This can always act to drive the current tenants to seek less expensive alternatives.

Using the UCSD Mt. Soledad Communications Site as a comparison to the UCSDMCS, these sites lease at a premium price and are judged to be some of the most valuable communications real estate in the City.

MARKETING

To attract new tenants, and keep existing tenants, the customer has to believe in the value of the site. It clearly becomes a marketing issue to convince a new user that a high price is still a competitive price based on location and features.

Otherwise, they will seek a less costly location. They will often trade features and security for a lower buy-in and operations fee because the operating margins are small in the communications industry for most segments.

Communications companies often don’t have the budget to support monthly lease payments at a five-star communications site and will seek a less costly site and try to engineer comparable performance.

This leads us to discussing the target market for present and future tenants at UCSDMCS. With the realization that a pricing structure that is non-competitive with other site facilities requires that the UCSDMCS selectively identify those clients that are most likely to use the UCSDMCS facilities.

The UCSDMCS management should identify their likely clients and structure the facilities to attract their business.

The most likely clients are broadcasters, public safety (police, fire and sheriff), wireless and microwave infrastructure users.

Again, the decision to request and maintain tenancy by tenants will be most dependent on the UCSDMCS pricing structure as well as the sites features and management.

In administering the process of lease negotiation for a new tenant, the site manager needs a clear sense of the value of the equipment space and antenna space. At most communications sites this is tailored by breaking the available rentable slots into number of rentable rack units per floor space footprint.

MANAGEMENT

When working with clients we can help to develop an equation that uses the fixed costs to maintain the site that would include the costs of management, access, electrical, environment and facilities.

The variable costs of electrical, site maintenance and environmental would be the second part of the equation and, of course, a final variable to represent the margin of profit.

EQUIPMENT ROOM

Electrical costs are considered twice to allow for the continued operation of lighting, fire suppression, utility telephone and site security as well as the pro-rated costs to operate the mixture of electrical and electronic hardware based upon the quiescent demand as well as the peak demand and the duty cycle.

This electrical demand can be estimated either by power meter to measure a typical monthly demand and an allowance for a peak demand by a mutually agreed formula, or by using the worst case figures of electrical power requirements based on the manufacturing specifications with an estimate of the duty cycle.

In either case, a periodic, un-announced measurement of the electrical demand by any client should be made for a fixed and reasonable period of time to allow for an extrapolated estimate of the power demands of the clients equipment. This periodic measurement process is normally one of the tasks arranged for by the site manager and the cost for doing so is included in the sites overall management budget.

A primary mission of the site manager is to develop a set of protocols for the negotiating of site lease terms as well as documents that collect the requisite data to be included in a site lease agreement to be prepared by the legal department of the Medical Center. The problem of pricing the lease is no different from any other business and is a supply and demand product. We often see terrific communication sites stay relatively empty because they are priced too high.

Once the negotiations have been completed and a lease document has been executed, the site manager oversees the installations confirming that the tenant follows the Equipment Installation Guidelines (Appendix A) and the Technical Requirements for the communications facility (Appendix B). These are examples only and are meant to be a starting point for the UCSDMCS site manage to develop his/her own unique guidelines.

An excellent document, an industry standard, is Motorola’s ‘R56 :

STANDARDS AND GUIDELINES FOR COMMUNICATION SITES’. The Table of Contents for the guideline is in Appendix C along with instructions

to order a copy for the UCSDMCS files. At six-hundred pages it is the

most comprehensive single document for constructing and commissioning a

radio site and well worth the investment.

Since the site is an accumulation of electromagnetic radiators, the management of the site requires a vigilant review and requirement of posted licenses and authorizations from the Federal Communications Commission as well as annual measurements to confirm that the rooftop conforms to the FCC guidelines on Radio Frequency Radiation (RFR).

In addition, anytime a group of multiple frequency radiation devices are collocated the need to determine if intermodulation interference between transmitters will render harm to receivers or other surrounding equipment.

The proper mix of poorly engineered or installed equipment could, for example, interfere with hospital CATV systems or emergency medical devices or radios. Interference is a much-overlooked consequence to new equipment installation only to be discovered down the line when harm is being done.

Physical inspection of the room and roof structures is important. Effects of weather and poor mechanical connections can create problems to the radio environment as a whole. Also, there may be specific OSHA requirements to provide certain radiation areas to be protected from human penetration.

There may be painting, signage and lighting requirements as well as

lightning considerations. Once again, the Motorola R56 Guidelines are an

excellent reference. Appendix F is an FAA Advisory Document relating to

structures and lighting.

The UCSDMCS is a unique communications site because of its location and site elevation. It should be a valuable profit center for the Medical Center. As is often the case, sites such as this often evolve over time as interest and technologies develop. When this happens the determination of pricing structures is often determined ad hoc and is not based on any long term planning.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In order to maintain site stability the UCSDMCS needs to have a set of standards and management to oversee the daily operations while maintaining a sense of the industry direction, competitors and the going rate for communications site real estate.

Fini