DAMM has through its partner PMR Products in UK ensured the delivery of TETRA infrastructure for the Cardiff city centre. The Cardiff city centre partnership RadioNet system provides communications services, linking; retail, local government, entertainment and leisure business with the Police and CCTVcontrol rooms. For this modern and forward thinking partnership only the most modern of radio systems was suitable for its recent upgrade and this was TETRA. Already established as the radio technology for Public Safety applications, the newly affordable single site package from PMR Products incorporating SafetyNet Digital and DAMM TetraFlex® TETRA infrastructure and Sepura’s Hand Held terminals was the obvious choice.

The public are now accustomed to seeing Police and emergency services with TETRA radios and the migration of the technology to private schemes like Cardiff RadioNet is the next logical choice, especially in multi-agency schemes. The radio equipment was supplied by Sepura. SafetyNet Digital provides back office management of the system within the city centre CCTV and police control room providing a range of advanced facilities for monitoring users and logging of all radio activity with command and control functionality. SafetyNet controls and links in with the DAMM TetraFlex® TETRA base station equipment which is the heart of the communications system.

Used in a city centre schemes like the flagship project in Cardiff, TETRA provides multi-agency communications providing separate talk groups for many different disciplines within the retail, police, city centre teams and local authority groups, seamlessly and without interference in a secure way.

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".