Vertel provides upgrade to air services

Airservices Australia provides safe and environmentally sound air traffic control management to airside services for the nation's busiest airports.

Aviation Rescue and Fire Fighting (ARFF) is one of Airservices' most important roles and is claimed to be the world's largest provider of ARFF services.

The challenge presented by the company was to upgrade their ageing radio network at 19 ARFF services locations Australia-wide.

Two primary drivers were presented; firstly to meet Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) standards, it needed to improve incident response times, which are directly impacted by the communications systems in use. Secondly, the maintenance costs associated with running an obsolete system were continually increasing and becoming more difficult to manage.

Other requirements included improved user familiarity, voice clarity and coverage, intrinsically safe portable radios, improved connectivity between sites and interoperability with other government agencies at select sites.

Vertel, acting as prime contractor and systems integrator, designed a solution to meet the long-term requirements of ARFF. The contract, to upgrade Airservices communication systems across the 19 locations, comprised Tait P25 digital radio, Australian Standards compliant Icom airband equipment, on-site user training and both corrective and preventative maintenance agreements.

The company interfaced the communications equipment to ARFF systems such as voice recorders, PA systems and ASA WAN, in fire control towers and a variety of operational appliances.

It is important for employees to be able to clearly hear a request from someone standing next to a jet engine, when hose pumps are operating or sirens are blaring. Digital mobiles and portables provide this benefit, which is critical in emergency situations when lives can depend on communication and response times.

Vertel selected P25 digital radios to design a solution to meet the requirements. P25 technology is said to be effective at filtering out background noise and also maintains speech audio clarity right to the edge of the radio coverage area.

The TB9100 voice over IP ethernet network interface allowed for multiple sites to be linked together via the existing local area network. When a call is made, the bases operating on that channel at each site receive and compare the signal. The base with the highest quality signal then retransmits across all sites in that network.

CASA standards require that portable radios used around aircraft and aviation fuel must be intrinsically safe. TP9160 IS portables were chosen to meet CASA's safety requirements.

Interoperability has proved to be a benefit for airport operations. When an emergency occurs on the runway, Airservices are the first responders, but will often need to coordinate and communicate with other government agencies. P25 equipment has the ability to talk with other conventional analog radios, as well as other agencies using digital radios, which makes multiagency communication that much easier when the need arises.

Using the built-in ethernet interface on the repeater equipment has also allowed the company to link the radio sites from each airport together and monitor every channel from any location with access to the IP network. This provides both companies the ability to be notified of and diagnose any problems that might arise from a remote location, lowering maintenance costs and system downtime.

Vertel has provided Airservices with a complete solution, from extensive system design and installation to product training and ongoing support.