The Honolulu Police Department will spend $700,000 to enhance its back-up dispatch radio system in order to avoid outages like one that the department suffered Tuesday.

HPD experienced a radio blackout for 46 minutes, a problem that was caused by a malfunctioning computer control card, officials said.

Last June, the same radio system suffered intermittent problems for three days. Six months before that, the system went down for six hours.

Following the trouble, HPD switched to a less efficient back-up system.

"I don't think we have an excessive amount of bugs," Assistant Chief Eugene Uemura said. "I think every system throughout the United States has similar kinds of problems and there's no system that is without any of these kinds of problems."

Uemura said that the alternate dispatching center should be in place in three months.