Sepura secures Cardiff city centre

30th April 2009 – Cardiff’s city centre partnership RadioNet is the first retail management and security radio system in the UK to adopt Sepura radios. This is the first deployment of a municipal TETRA network in the UK.

This important contract was secured by Sepura’s partner PMR Products. PMR Products implemented RadioNet’s migration from analogue to digital technology with the deployment of a TETRA network supplied by the Danish infrastructure supplier Damm.

RadioNet is a municipal partnership which provides communications services linking retail, local government, entertainment and leisure business with the Police and CCTV control rooms. The new digital scheme adopted by RadioNet enables seamless and uninterrupted multi-agency communication by providing separate talk groups for different disciplines within the retail, police, city centre and local authority teams.

These teams of radio users need to liaise at different times, most often to resolve issues related to security. In addition, each user needs to be clearly recognised and identified when speaking and audio must be of the necessary high quality when communicating in a busy and noisy city centre.

Sepura’s hand-held radios were selected for their compact size and weight, which makes them easily carried by shop-workers and wardens. The radios’ ability to integrate with the network’s advanced features was also a significant requirement. In addition, the terminals’ versatile and flexible programming capabilities, plus their sophisticated status messaging features, made them ideal for the Cardiff RadioNet scheme. Sepura radios were also able to meet another fundamental requirement of this project: the need to display all the retailers’ and users’ names in the new 1,000 entry phone book.

Steve Clarke, managing Director for PMR Products commented “The installation was completed in a record time of less than 10 days and the actual changeover from analogue to digital occurred over a single weekend. The penetration of the radio signals around Cardiff city centre is vastly superior to that of the previous equipment and the audio quality is noticeably higher. In particular, remote access to the system for diagnostic purposes proved to be invaluable when a complete power failure across the city knocked all the systems out”.

Richard Redgrave, Regional Sales Director for Sepura said “Sepura is privileged to have been involved in the Cardiff RadioNet project: the first of its type in the UK. TETRA is slowly becoming the communications technology of choice of non-blue light organisations. We are confident that with the support of our valued partners, such as PMR Products, we will be at the forefront of this phenomenon”.