Airwave Dish Aerial Van?

[Messyshaw]

I noticed that during the Head of Commonwealth Heads in London last week, a huge secure compound was created around 2 x Park Lane hotels. The perimeter was patrolled by private security and lots of Met Police.

I would imagine the radio comms requirement would compare favourably to a serious fire in terms of traffic and area (m2), so I was surprised to see an Airwave Land rover with a dish aerial parked there for the duration of the gig.

I know there are limitations to this comms kit, but this is central london so surely this cant be to increase airwave capacity?

So what would they need that for?

[MarkG]

Could be resilience, an off the grid back up unit in case things went titsy?

[Becile]

Airwave have quite a few of these vans..deployed to areas where airwave traffic may increase at times, it basically acts as another local tower so that all local calls ( maybe for event management )are routed through this network transmitter/receiver, rather than the usual trunked network. The police who use point to point transmission take up huge chunks of Airwave! (And I suspect other security divisions). Rather than us (fire)using more data and general talkgroup traffic.

Interestingly when the airwave network starts reaching capacity fire get priority over police when the calls start could get restricted/ throttled.?

[Messyshaw]

Interesting stuff. Thanks