Great news for rural businesses! Our PoC radio solution helps Tonbridge safety partnership expand its reach
THE CHALLENGE
Safer Towns in Tonbridge is an established Business Crime Prevention Partnership, centred in Tonbridge and they have an existing fleet of licensed radios in the field, for partner shops and businesses to keep in touch with the control room. The radios are linked through a repeater situated in the town, but the range of this equipment does not extend to the more rural towns within the Tonbridge & Malling Borough Council area.
How could the Partnership bring shops & businesses in these areas into the family to improve the communications regarding local crime & safety planning?
THE SOLUTION
Smye-Rumsby is partnered with many such organisations and work closely with them on their communications needs. In this instance to provide coverage across the whole area would require significant investment in both hardware and software, linking up multiple repeaters to a network.
The Push-To-Talk over Cellular (PoC) systems now available do not rely on traditional radio signals, but instead use the national cellular network or local broadband services. These could communicate to the existing radio network through a PoC to DMR Gateway.
After carefully reviewing and trialling the equipment available, Smye-Rumsby selected the ENTEL DN495 PoC Handsets, and the ENTEL E-PoC GW485 UHF Gateway. Once the decision was made to go ahead the handsets were prepared and the Gateway installed next to the repeater in Tonbridge.
THE OUTCOME
From the moment they were switched on the equipment worked perfectly. The team were able to communicate with the traditional radios across the Tonbridge & Malling area, and each other from even outside the Council area. As a result, the Safer Towns Partnership have enrolled new rural members to the scheme and expanded their communications system without the need for a large capital investment.
