Posts by highfrequency 5 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2021
I agree that critical communications should never be a commercial enterprise. The system has delivered vast profits to its owners whilst at the same time cost the taxpayers a considerable amount, not to mention the restrictions it's prohibitable cost has placed on it's users.
The political point doesn't really stand though as it was conceived under Labour during their failed PFI phase.
If the government had took control of the TETRA network when it had the chance, the savings would have been huge. The sheer amount of profit being made by Motorola from the Airwave system is obscene, and the government to want to shut it down quickly because it's 'expensive to run'!
When the rollout starts there is going to almost certainly be lots of complaints about coverage in rural areas vs Airwave.
AW definitely helped getting all control rooms on the same band. Before it was introduced 90% of brigades in England & Wales used the same AM 70MHz systems with all UK channels programmed in their radios. A few used FM systems which was a slight hurdle in some areas but were largely interoperable. Scotland using high band VHF and completely different to England and Wales.
I do know of at least one case where a county has setup AW differently with the crews requesting a call using status message. Unfortunately they seemingly now ignore anyone else calling in on the main group so when a neighboring force responds to a call in their county, they have to get messages through their own control room passed over the phone!
Simple is best with communications. You can spend millions of pounds on cutting edge complex technology showcasing what's technically possible, but a lot of the time the end users just don't need or want it.
Airwave is only used by the fire service from a vehicle radio to contact the county control room. Local on scene communications are by back-to-back UHF radios as that is the only way of guaranteeing in-building coverage.
Many brigades already have vehicle computers and tablets to access building information which is over the cellular networks.
Airwave was billed a giant leap forward when fire services moved over from their own VHF systems. The radios have 30+ talkgroups loaded in for all kind of interoperability, but in truth many still only use one channel and operate exactly as they have done for years.
Perhaps they realise that a simple all informed open voice channel is the most important communication tool they need.
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