Sundance utilizes nearly 500 portable radios, several base stations, five dispatch positions, six voted repeater channels, three single site repeater channels, and ten simplex channels. The 3rd St. R & D "Mother" service provides message handling, inventory control, and channel mediation.

Setup begins about a week before the festival kicks off. In that week, we emplace multiple sites to provide saturation coverage of Park City, Utah. Historically, that coverage has been extended to Salt Lake City with a duplicate, interconnected system connected via Telco T1. In recent years as Festival operations have concentrated in Park City, Salt Lake City Coverage has been discontinued.

Building construction in Park City is very hostile to radio communications, because buildings containing the Festival venues are engineered and built to withstand several feet of snow loading. That means lots of steel and masonry. Some of them are nearly impervious to radio propagation.

An extensive temporary radio system installation provides penetration into, and reception out of, these difficult environments. An end-to-end microwave system interconnects the sites for radio system audio and provides network connectivity for site status telemetry. The microwave backbone also provides network drops for remote PC-Based dispatch positions.

At the conclusion of the Festival, removal of the systems and inventory audit is accomplished in 3 days.

For the 2006 Festival, 3rd St. R & D has implemented a full-function MDC1200 unit ID system so that all users can see caller ID, and so that stuck microphones and nuisance transmissions can be held to a minimum. The MDC table contains 70 individual ID's and 30 departmental ID's.