poland
The Belchatów mine’s task is to feed this large power station. Its two 850megawatt generating units require 100000 tonnes of coal each day
Cutting coal – this giant machine tears away at the coal face and discharges the material on to a long, long conveyor belt
conveyor – where it is coupled to a huge mining machine, standing on tracked and wheelbases and towering upward to the sky, and with great steel structures extending ahead and behind. At its far end, a great toothed wheel rotates unrelentingly against the workface, tearing the coal away while sweeping from side to side in slow arcs. Just one man is operating this machine, from its cab.
But the TETRA radio network keeps him in constant communication with the mine’s main control room, and with operational, engineering and other staff. Te mine is served by a four-site Damm Cellular infrastructure, with antennas located around the crater and looking down into it over the rim.
Tis configuration was decided upon during the planning stage of the project. “We made propagation calculations and from this we found out that to sustain the proper radio coverage for the people, it was necessary to put in four sites”, explains Wojciech Rabczuk, of Consortia, the Polish company which supplied the system. “It was easier for us because the sites had existing masts for the previous analogue system.”
Tat system was a SmarTrunk analogue network – an American trunking technology – populated with Yaesu (Vertex) radios. It had been a reliable and stable system and it offered useful features such as telephone access (telephone interconnect), but after 10 years it was becoming hard to obtain service support or replacement parts for broken radios. But another reason for seeking a replacement radio system was organizational change at the Belchatów mine. “We have separated into many different companies which are working in the mine”, explains Wojciech Jurenczyk, telecom administrator for the mine. “Tat’s why we needed a system which supports the differing VPNs and different groups. Tey are different companies, using different work groups and talkgroups, and they needed flexibility for co- operation between those companies. Tat’s why TETRA was the best choice – for the safety services, rescue services, transportation and logistics, and mining services. Tey are different companies working in the same environment.” And he added: “TETRA is widely the standard for the whole world. Tat’s why we decided to use it.”
System enhancements For the Consortia company, which won the tenders to design and supply the new network, this was its first TETRA project. But the company was able to contribute several specially-developed enhancements of its own. Among the most significant are the gateways linking analogue radio to TETRA, home-grown dispatcher terminals and a special telephone interface which enables a mining telephone to be coupled to a TETRA radio for full-duplex communication without wires. A number of mobiles are integrated with the PABX telephone numbering plan and they work just like ordinary telephone extensions.
Te network is based on multicast routers from Cisco, Looking down into the pit – a part of the giant Belchatów brown coal mine 30
with one router configured as the hub and a further router at each of the four radio sites. Tese are connected by optical fibre links, except for one site, which is shared
TE TRA TODAY Issue 14 2013
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