The P25 Compliance Assessment Program (P25 CAP) is a voluntary program for equipment manufacturers. The program is operated by the Office for Interoperability and Compatibility (OIC) within the Department of Homeland Security’s Science & Technology Directorate. Operating in a partnership with the P25 Standards process, P25CAP has established Compliance Assessment Bulletin (CAB) documents identifying the specific processes and tests required to show a piece of P25 equipment operates in compliance with the specified P25 Standards.

Manufacturers desiring to have their products included on DHS’ Approved Equipment List of equipment eligible for Federal Grant funding assistance to purchase will submit their products to DHS-recognized testing laboratories for “P25CAP Testing.”

Following this testing process, the manufacturers then submit their Supplier’s Declaration of Compliance (SDOC) and Summary Test Report (STR) documents to the P25CAP program office at DHS-S&T. These documents show the specific tests the item has passed (or does not support).

Once reviewed and accepted, these documents are then listed on DHS-S&T’s Approved (GrantEligible) Equipment page
https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/approved-grant-eligible-equipment
Please note that equipment on this list has been tested only to the specific tests identified in the CAB documents. These CAB documents are available upon request to mailto:[email protected]. 

P25 CAP testing results are posted on the DHS P25 website Approved (Grant-Eligible) Equipment list.
Send any questions about specific listings or other information to [email protected].

The word “Certified” is not used in the description of CAP testing by DHS, NIST, TIA, or the PTIG member companies. A more appropriate statement would be: “The posting of SDoCs & STRs on the DHS OIC P25 CAP website means that compliance of the referenced products has been assessed by testing for specific features, functions, and services listed in the P25 CAP Summary Test Report (STR), validated by a P25 CAP recognized P25 Test laboratory, and approved by DHS OIC to be posted on the DHS OIC P25 CAP website.”
https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/p25-cap

If the SDOC and STR documents are not posted on the DHS website, they have yet to be approved by DHS OIC.

In general, “Project 25 (P25) compliance” is typically interpreted as: “adherence to the P25 standard”.
The P25 Standard is composed of over 80 documents that cover multiple interfaces, multiple services and multiple features associated with each interface or service. Therefore, questions or statements about compliance to the “P25 standard” are too vague to provide the understanding typically desired by those asking the questions or making the statements.
Questions or statements about any level of compliance are more effectively expressed in the context of a specific interface, a specific service or a specific feature that is covered by a published P25 standard document or in the context of a specific standard document. For example, the statement: “My equipment is P25 compliant” is difficult to correctly interpret because it does not identify any P25 standard interface or service or document or set of features.
A better statement would be along the lines of: “My radio is compliant to the P25 FDMA Air Interface, Trunking service, Group Voice Call feature.”

4 levels of P25 compliance:

Compliance in the context of the Statement of P25 User Needs (SPUN) document
Compliance statements at this level mean functionality covered by the SPUN has been implemented.

Compliance in the context of a published P25 Standard document
Compliance statements at this level mean functionality has been implemented in accordance with a P25 Standard document or documents.

Compliance in the context of a published P25 Standard test document
Compliance statements at this level means functionality has been implemented per a P25 Standard document and has passed P25 standard tests associated with that functionality.

Compliance in the context of the DHS OIC Compliance Assessment Program (CAP)
The DHS OIC Compliance Assessment Program identifies equipment tests that may or may not be included in the P25 suite of standards. When CAP testing uses tests included in the P25 suite of standards, then compliance statements at this level means the tested functionality has been implemented per a P25 Standard document (or documents) and this functionality has passed its associated P25 standard tests that are included in CAP Compliance Assessment Bulletins (CABs) and the testing was performed in CAP recognized labs and the test results are reported in a CAP approved document.

P25 Test standards are typically created by the appropriate TIA TR8 Committee along with the associated P25 standard in TIA subcommittees. These test standards are created alongside the other documents (like Messages & Procedures) in TIA subcommittees.
The P25 test documents ensure that under specific conditions and specific configurations, equipment built by different manufacturers will operate as prescribed by the published standards.

There are 3 types of test documents published:
• Performance Tests - These tests ensure that various aspects of Interface implementations are
interoperable and meet various regulatory requirements.
• Interoperability Tests - These tests ensure that various implementations of standard
interfaces, services and features provide the user functionality intended by the standard.
• Conformance Tests - These tests ensure that implementations of standard interfaces, services and features provide the intended functionality by adhering to the messages, message content and message exchanges prescribed by the standards.P25 CAP testing requirements are defined in the testing requirements section at
https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/bulletins, which defines the tests required such as Performance, Conformance, and Interoperability for the type of equipment being tested.

RCATS are TSBs, Telecommunications Systems Bulletins, and as such, are recommendations and not standards. The following describes how RCATS, Recommended Compliance Assessment Tests, are created. RCATs are drafted by the creators of the associated TIA Standards with Industry lead and consultation with User Agency representatives.

• Project 25 Steering Committee adopts the TIA RCAT TSB as part of the suite of P25 Standards.
• TIA publishes and maintains the P25 RCAT TSB.
• P25 Steering Committee forwards P25 RCAT TSB to the DHS Compliance Assessment Program (CAP) Advisory Panel (AP) for consideration during Compliance Assessment Bulletin (CAB) creation or modification.

The Compliance Assessment Bulletins (CABs) are the official documents used in P25 CAP Test laboratories for testing. CABs are published by DHS OIC.

Understand and keep a record of the equipment versions that you have. Check the current CAP documentation for your equipment to determine if it covers your equipment versions and the CAB version that they were tested to.