Industry Systems

Paper mill

A medium size industry like for example a paper mill, have used two way radios for many years. They have started with analogue and are now maybe shifting over to DMR or Tetra. They have a need to talk to both old and new radios from both control room and from the guard house. The guard house also needs to be in contcat with the fire departments radio system incase of an incident.

Ontop of this they might have small systems that are only used locally, like cordless headsets.

System solution

With a SoftRadio system all of the radio nets above can be combined in one dispatch system. Operator PC´s can be placed both in control rooms and in the guard house.

Fixed radios are connected to IP through network interfaces and remote controlled from PC dispatchers.

Old and new radio channels can be cross patched together giving the legacy equipment a longer life.

Positioning

New digital radio systems have the upside of being able to send in the positions of the users radios.

With a Mimer MapView system connected you will in real time see where all resourses are. And if someone would press the emergency key on the portable, the personel in the guard house will be alerted emediatly.

Large Chemical industry

Several chemical plants in Sweden have left their analogue systems behind and gone over to Tetra.

In order to get a flexible dispatch system mainly for use in the control rooms, they have a Mimer SoftRadio system.

System solution

Separate from the Tetra system itself a rack with fixed radios and network interfaces is built. Some of the radios are connected to full feature interfaces so that they can be used for private calls, SDS messaging and be used on all talk groups.

Other radios are connected to light interfaces and can only be used on one fixed talk group. In this way all dispatchers can monitor all of the most important talkgroups in parallel.

All dispatchers will be able to listen to all the fixed talk groups in parallel. Plus listen to the full feature radios. If one dispatcher transmits on one radio, he will not disturb the other dispatchers as he would do if they all had their own radios.

Since all radios are available at all dispatchers, they can for example have a different number of radios to monitor in the daytime and in the night time.

The radios used by the dispatchers works stand alone, this means that if the Tetra system would fale for some reason, the dispatch system will continue to work. The fixed radios can then easily be switched over to DMO-mode as fallback.

Cross patch to marine radio

Many transports are done through the harbours. Therefor there is a need to talk from Tetra ATEX portable radios to ships on marine channels.

This is accomplished by using the Mimer X-Link with a fixed cross patch from a Tetra radio to a marine radio. In the Tetra system the talk group to use is named “Marine CH10” etc.

Many dispatchers sharing advanced radios and radios with a fixed talk group

Operator at a chemical plant

Rail yard

The shunting of trains have always required radio communication. The work is a cooperation between the train driver, the guys on the rail yard and the guys in the tower. As the years have passed more and more special functions have been built into the old analogue systems to make the work easier.

The large rail transport company Green Cargo had come to end of life of their custom built dispatch consoles and needed something new.

Their plan is also to upgrade to DMR in the near future. Therefor a new dispatch system was needed. One that could handle the old analogue with its special functions and also the new digital.

System solution

Today each rail yard have 4-5 channels for different tasks. All of them shall be monitored in parallel from the tower and transmission shall be possible on one at a time or on several at the same time. In addition there are functions for signalling of train in reverse, emergency alarm and a log in function on certain channels.

Since Mimer SoftRadios GUI is so flexible, many of the special requests from the old system could be done with standard equipment. To this we also added some extra keys and scripts to get all functions to work and feel very similar to the old console.

The learning curve for the dispatchers is a matter of minutes, since they immediately recognise the functionality.

To give some extra functions they can now select between goose neck microphone or handset, and they can use the same console not only for radio calls, but also for SIP-phone calls.

The old console had a number of multiwire cables connected. The new console has just one TP-cable that goes down to the radio rack. This is possible since also all audio is digitised. It is also possible to connect more than one console to the system, both local and remote.

Simplified drawing of the setup at Green Cargo

Special layout of keys for Green Cargo

In the shunting tower

Analogue dispatcher

Touch Screen dispatch console for a shunting tower