Thames Valley Police
Thames Valley Police cover an area of 2,220 sq miles in Southern Central England, and as a result have a large sophisticated network of VHF and UHF radio communications facilities, which need to be monitored and maintained. In order to achieve this, a Radio Management System (RMS) for the whole of the UHF system has been designed and installed.
The Radio Management System is based upon Cyfas RTU hardware and Panorama SCADA software running under Windows. Communications between the outstations and the six area control centres are cleverly based upon the modems sharing both speech and data.
Each area control centre monitors alarms from each radio site, line fail detection and line fail talkthrough. The operators are able to directly control site talkthrough, bay change and frequency selection. The area control centres are wide area networked via Panorama, back to the Radio Communications Department at headquarters.
The system has enabled the Thames Valley Police to remotely diagnose faults and carry out tests on the system, thus ensuring the visiting maintenance crew is fully equipped for the task in hand, leading to a significant reduction in maintenance and running costs of the system.