poland
TETRA power G
As a commercial and tourist centre and a hub for flights to Scandinavia, Gdansk Airport is seeing a steep rise in flight traffic
dansk – or Danzig – on Poland’s Baltic coast, is a thousand-year-old trading centre which to this day remains an important seaport. Its shipyards gained worldwide fame as the birthplace of the Solidarity movement, which brought an end to Communist rule in central Europe. Today, the historic streets of the old town, its picturesque waterfront scenes and its hundreds of beautiful buildings are a magnet for tourists treating themselves to a city break. Many of these visitors arrive via the city’s airport, which is named after Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader. Passenger numbers at the airport have been rising rapidly, boosted recently by a second terminal building completed in readiness for the Euro 2012 football tournament in Poland, for which Gdansk was a principal match venue. With its single runway, the airport then faced a huge
increase in its workload as extra flights delivered thousands of foreign football supporters on important match days. So
Richard Lambley visits three innovative radio installations in Poland, a country where smaller TETRA systems are proving to be especially popular and successful
a new TETRA radio system to support ground operations at the site became a key part of its preparations for this influx.
“Te previous system here was based on VHF, simplex channels only”, explains Dariusz Adamczyk, vice-president of Aksel, the Polish system integration company which designed and implemented the TETRA project. “It had a lot of problems, especially when they started the construction of the second hall for arrivals and departures. Every company, every section, every division used different VHF channels, so communication between each other in a crisis situation was impossible. Tey all spoke on different channels, including fire brigades. No co-ordination! “Looking to the future and Euro 2012 football, they said it would be impossible to handle that, because they expected seven times more flights than usual. So it was the first decision.” Since then, the growth in numbers has continued: Gdansk Airport is currently handling some three million passengers per year, with an annual increase of 10 per cent. Ten years ago, the figure was a mere half-million. In his office near the airport’s cargo terminal is telecommunications specialist Krzysztof Wnek, who manages the radio system. At present, he says, 300 radios are in use – 200 TETRA plus 100 analogue, which run on three analogue channels. It was essential that these systems could interwork so as to ensure a smooth migration to what may eventually become an all-digital system, and so they have been fully interconnected via IP gateways provided by Aksel. “We supplied them a Rohill solution which is based
The new passenger terminal at Gdansk, finished in 2012 but soon to be extended 22
on IP, which can connect to the VHF and UHF and conventional MPT 1327 radios”, comments Dariusz Adamczyk. “It is a fantastic solution because at the beginning there is no pressure to change all the radios to TETRA. From the finance point of view, it’s a fantastic tool.”
TE TRA TODAY Issue 14 2013
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