England's Largest Police Force Adopts Sepura's Radio Management Tool

Sepura, a major player in the TETRA radio market, has reportedly announced that Devon and Cornwall Constabulary in the U.K. has rolled out Sepura’s Radio Manager Server version with remote clients located in the majority of its police stations.

Devon and Cornwall Constabulary is England’s largest police force in terms of geographical area served. They have experienced tangible financial benefits by adopting Sepura’s radio management tool, which makes the programming process more efficient. This tool ensures that the police officers are never further than 20 minutes travel time away from a remote programming location.

 

The constabulary has been using TETRA for few years now. The force completed the migration to TETRA in 2005 and acquired more than 4,500 hand-held radios and over 500 vehicle and fixed mobile terminals. Sepura supplied the entire hand-held fleet of radios for the project.

 

“The introduction of Sepura’s remote programming pods means that officers can receive updates and upgrades at their own station or at a nearby station,” said Tim Bishop, Airwave development manager for Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, in a statement. “We planned the distribution of the pods so that nobody needs to travel more than 20 kilometres to receive upgrades and/or updates for their TETRA radios.”

 

Before deploying radio manager throughout the force, the officials ran a pilot of the technology over the Christmas and New Year period. The pilot was successful and successfully delivered the upgrade of over 1,000 hand-held radios with the use of just 4 programming pods.

 

Bishop is also pleased that the radio’s Personal Identification Number can be reset remotely. Before the deployment, a handset was locked each time an incorrect PIN was entered three times. Once they faced this situation, police officers had to travel to the nearest engineer and wait for the radio to be unlocked again. 

 

The remote PIN resetting has freed them from this waste of time and now a typical event of this type may only last 5 minutes. The project has delivered other benefits, as well. Earlier, a force-wide update typically took months to implement, but thanks to Sepura, an update of this magnitude can be carried out within a single cycle of duty shifts, added Bishop.

 

Richard Redgrave, U.K. and Ireland sales director for Sepura, said that the initial investment in hardware, software and communications links will be paid back by the first software upgrade. He described radio manager as a “fantastic radio management system” that overcomes the logistical challenge of rapidly updating large quantities of radios.

 

“We look forward to a wider adoption of this product by many more organizations from a variety of sectors world-wide as Sepura delivers the lowest cost of ownership over the full life cycle of the radio fleet to its customers,” Redgrave said in a statement.