UK Lowland Rescue adopts Motorola digital radio network

Motorola Solutions has delivered a secure, digital two-way radio communications network based on its MOTOTRBO technology for the Association of Lowland Search & Rescue (Lowland Rescue) to improve its search and rescue voice and data communications.

Lowland Rescue is a self-financing organisation with more than 1800 highly trained volunteers who are called on by local Police Search Advisors (POLSAs) to provide search management and physical search for high-risk missing persons — typically those with dementia, children or who are suicidal. During the first few vital hours of a missing person report, Lowland Rescue can call on 36 search teams in the UK with specialists in dog handling, flood rescue and waterway search.

“The Police Service has to do more with less and is becoming increasingly more reliant on professional volunteers,” said Kris Manning, chairman, Lowland Rescue. “Developing mission-critical communications solutions that bring our teams and hopefully other SAR organisations onto a single, interoperable network is one of our responses to this challenge.”

13 Lowland Rescue teams have migrated to the organisation’s digital radiocommunications network, known as LRnet, with the others set to follow. LRnet is based on a MOTOTRBO Linked Capacity Plus system joining single sites across an IP network to provide a high-capacity, voice and data wide area communication solution. LRnet has deployed eight fixed MOTOTRBO DR 3000 repeaters with plans to extend to 16, plus additional mobile repeaters fitted to incident control vehicles.

“We selected MOTOTRBO digital two-way radio because, straight out of the box, it let us communicate on a wide area basis, creating a Talk Group Plan that is consistent across all the United Kingdom’s teams,” said Paul Westwell, communications officer, Lowland Rescue.

The 300 MOTOTRBO DP4601, DP4801 handheld radios and DM4601 vehicle-mounted mobile radios registered on the network are tracked by a registration database that includes their last known locations. Lowland Rescue has also integrated SAR mapping applications via a common global positioning system (GPS) database. The MOTORBO digital radios report their location at regular five-minute intervals to a central LRnet database and are shown on this national mapping system. This enhanced location-based functionality, along with audio clarity and security, helps improve the safety of the volunteers using the radios.

A spokesperson for Motorola Solutions said the company will continue to work with Lowland Rescue including trialling new technologies such as WAVE, which can deliver secure broadband push-to-talk communications between the MOTOTRBO radios and volunteers’ mobile devices.

Image courtesy of Motorola Solutions.

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