poland
still using some of the analogue radios but the migration should be completed quite soon.” Also included in the installation are telephone
interconnect gateways by Innovaphone and a logging server recorder. Around 1200 radios altogether are needed at the mine, and the analogue gateways have allowed the older handportables to continue in use. Some of these were bought only two years ago, but they will in time be replaced with TETRA. Apart from SDS status messaging, used in managing the
remote radio sites – including monitoring the state of the electricity supply, access to the sites, opening doors, etc. – the TETRA network is not yet used for data transmission. Tough many wireless data systems are in operation at the mine, they rely on GPRS or narrowband radio. “We are considering the deployment of telemetry
The radio system
and its subscribers are managed from this workstation in the telecoms department.
Wojciech Jurenczyk is standing at left
with a mobile phone operator; here a radio link is used, a Motorola Canopy system on 5·7GHz. Installing the system took six months and it entered
full service in June 2012. Some 800 radios were supplied, mostly MTM 5400 mobiles and MTP 850 handportables (ATEX-certified radios were not required at this site). However, 100 of the handportables have since been replaced with the newer MTP 3000, which, with its two- watt audio amplifier, sounds much louder. It was found that this extra volume was needed by users who work close to the noisy mining machinery. No special audio accessories such as headsets are used, though. “Tey have microphones only”, says Wojciech. “But the two-watt audio coming out from the MTP 3000 is enough. It’s very clear, very clear and loud. Tey like them!” Te radio system is now operated entirely by the telecoms department of the mine, he adds. “We wanted a very smooth migration between analogue and digital, because in companies like this it is very important not to waste any working days – it generates huge costs. We are
systems”, Wojciech Jurenczyk continues. “But it’s quite a new installation, so we need to get some more experience using the system. Tere are some applications for telemetry – for example, using GPS for monitoring the mobiles and tracking them on maps of the mine. We are testing this because there is no accurate GPS coverage in some places. So it may be a problem.”
Remote management In the telecoms department’s building is the main dispatcher station for managing the TETRA network. From here the operator can control and monitor the condition of all radio sites on the network and manage the subscriber database. Consortia’s Wojciech Rabczuk explains that the dispatcher and management applications were developed by his company using APIs supplied by Damm. “You can do everything here”, he says, with enthusiasm. “Come and look close! “Te application is based on Windows, so using Remote
Desktop you can remotely control each of the stations from here. It’s very simple to manage. You can manage the transmitter, you can manage the site controller, database and so on. It’s enough to change the database of the main controller and all the data is transferred to the other controllers at other sites.”
Also on the system is a logging server which records
At one of the remote radio sites, Wojciech Rabczuk of Consortia, the supplier of the system, checks up on the Damm Cellular base station controller
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events and voice transmissions, capturing up to 20 calls simultaneously. Trough an IP connection, a client terminal can connect to the voice recorder and play out the recorded speech. Glancing at the screen, we can see that just 277 subscribers are currently active on the system, out of some 600 radios which are registered and ready to work. Wojciech comments that normal traffic levels are quite low but that a large capacity is ready for use during any incident. And he points out another feature of the Damm network: “Tere is no one point of failure. Maybe the roaming between sites will not be working, but if you want to say ‘Help!’, you can.” On the screen, he calls up a system log display showing status codes all the way back to December 2011, when the system was initially being set up. Te status indications are green all the way through, except for some spots of
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