HONOLULU -- The Police Department's Alternate Communications Center had two big problems Tuesday during a demonstration for the media, problems that officials didn't tell reporters about at the time.

The back-up system is supposed to assure that police dispatchers will be able to remain in contact with officers in the field if the main dispatch system goes down at police headquarters.

They are also supposed to be able to take emergency calls from the public, but both of those activities didn't go that well Tuesday. The city spent $900,000 on this Alternate Communications Center in the basement of the Kapolei Police station.

It handled police dispatch operations for 12 hours Tuesday from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m. at night.

But for the better part of the morning, "call takers" answering emergency calls from the public kept getting cut off in the first few seconds.

Police officials estimate between 40 and 50 calls got disconnected, but they have no way of knowing any exact numbers.

Some callers complained they were cut off two or three times.

Police eventually figured out the problem: operators back at police headquarters hadn't been trained properly to transfer calls to the backup system.

"Operating two phone systems, we had to learn that we have to hold on longer, before we disconnect the call," HPD Communications officer Capt. Scott Foster said. "Once we figured that out, now we have a procedure in place, where we're not going to do that again, we're not going to lose any calls."

Police say by a little before noon, they had cleared up that problem. But there was another problem that lasted all day:

Police in the field say dispatchers using the back-up radio system were at times difficult to hear, and they had to repeat transmissions two or three times.

Officers say the audio quality was unreadable occasionally all over the island.

The captain in charge of dispatch says the back-up system was never meant to be as clear as the regular radio system.

"We are taking voice, digitizing it, sending it through a computer, then back to a radio, then back into voice. So as a result, the voice quality is slightly degraded," Foster said.

These problems were going on, even as HPD Chief Lee Donohue and Mayor Jeremy Harris were extolling the new system one floor away. When reporters asked a representative of the company providing the technology if there were any problems he said no, but that clearly wasn't the case.

Foster said that the bottom line is, "The ultimate effect was there was no degradation of service. We handled all calls, we were able to receive and transmit information."

Foster said that the department plans to run dispatch out of the back-up site in Kapolei four times a year so that the staff will get used to it, and there won't be as many problems in the future.