News

South African power utility Eskom signs supply contract

South African electricity utility Eskom has signed a Supply Contract with 4RF distributor, Emcom Africa, for the supply and support of 25 kHz 4RF Aprisa SE and 500 kHz 4RF Aprisa XE fixed wireless access systems.

The contract was signed after a test and evaluation programme conducted by Eskom in South Africa.

Emcom Africa Sales Director, Rob Fryer, says, Eskom maintains a comprehensive, independent radio network. They'll deploy the 4RF microwave radio systems to transmit integrated voice and data services in remote monitoring applications, and VHF mobile voice networks. These services are central to the performance and security of their infrastructure, and their delivery of energy to the South African economy.

Eskom receive both engineering and commercial advantages with the deployment. The equipment transmits their services over the vast distances of Africa economically and without expensive infrastructure, and may be remotely configured and monitored reducing operational expenses. Both the Aprisa SE and Aprisa XE terminals successfully interface with legacy analogue, and digital IP elements, providing Eskom with a future-proofed and forward-facing access solution, says Mr Fryer.

The contract was signed with Emcom Africa in March 2005, and includes right-of-renewal options.

Eskom is responsible for the generation, transmission and distribution of around 95% of South Africa's electricity from 24 power stations, and a transmission network extending more than 26,000 kilometres. Eskom Enterprises core business includes infrastructure development, energy operations, and the pursuit of key opportunities in related strategic businesses such as information technology and telecommunications. The company has operations on the African continent, and offices in Uganda, Nigeria and Mali.

Tait Electronics has won a 2-year contract to supply the South African Police Services (SAPS) with mobile and portable radio communications products.

The company has sent the first shipment of mobiles and portables to its exclusive South African distributor, Emcom, as part of a two-year terminals contract with SAPS. The deal, worth NZ$6m over the two years, is for the supply of T2020 mobiles and T5020 portables.

"Our offer was based upon the proven T2020 mobile transceiver, and T5020 portable transceiver," says Emcom Major Accounts Manager Ron Farnham.

"We are encouraged by the fact that the SAPS technical evaluation team chose to subject all competing products to rigorous physical testing, and not base their award upon price and brochures alone! Tait Electronics manufactures quality products and, quite frankly I'm not surprised we came out tops for both requirements," Mr Farnham says.

Tait mobile and portable radios have provided dependable communications in various units of the SAPS, are well known by the SAPS radio technical support units, and have been successfully deployed in mission critical applications.

Tait products have been extensively used within the SAPS for the last decade. The Tait T800 base station/repeater was the high-site equipment of choice when the SAPS upgraded their national system from 40MHz to 400MHz.

Emcom Africa has contributed its expertise and assistance in many SAPS related projects, including supplying the radio communications, encompassing mobile, portable, repeater, base station and GPS based Automatic Vehicle Location systems for two presidential inaugurations, numerous international conferences and a few confidential requirements.

"This project will once again highlight our professional ability to support the SAPS in the fulfilment of its endeavours," says Mr Farnham.

Talking with a dinosaur

Richard Lambley meets industry veteran Sir Angus Tait, founder of one of the world’s leading mobile radio manufacturers, during a recent visit to the UK.

"I’m a dinosaur", begins Angus Tait, arrestingly. He’s referring, though, not to his age or his exceptionally long innings in the radio industry – he passed his 81st birthday last month and is still actively involved in his company – but to his unashamedly sceptical views on the general rush into digital mobile technology.

"Everyone has been amazed at the great wave of cellular activity that’s swept across the world. The initial cellular wave was all analogue equipment and PMR is still substantially analogue and will be for some time.

"No one denies the inevitability that the future of all communications will be digital. But analogue will not go away entirely. I am quite convinced that analogue will remain in fringe activities. I’m not being defensive about this – I’m just setting the scene as it properly should be.

‘Over-hyped and over-sold’

"Some people have spent a lot of money in developing digital PMR and want to see it displace all PMR networks, trunked or otherwise, and they have a vested interest in doing that, of course. But in my view, the whole thing is over-hyped, oversold."

"They are making claims like ‘digital PMR will go further and will sound better’ – statements which, from a strict engineering point of view, I think, are untrue. Analogue will go further. Yes, it might get a little bit noisy at the end of the line but it’s operating at the end of the line when digital has long given up and is not audible at all."

"And to say that digital will sound better is simply untrue because if an analogue network is correctly engineered, it can be hi-fi. A digital network has got to be very well engineered to sound correct and if it’s carelessly engineered it will sound terrible".

"Over the last two decades, there have been a lot of strange things said about the way of the future. I’ll remind of one: ten years ago, we were subject to a blitz of information: the future is a paperless office. Absolute rubbish! There’s more trees being chopped down now than ever!

"And a similar statement was made about ten years ago: that voice communications will be a thing of the past and we’re going to talk to one another with ones and zeros and it’s all going to be data. Yes, there is data being moved and there is great promise of large amounts of data being used – but the uptake of data has been very slow. Now, whether that’s because the providers of the service have not really understood what the user needed, a lot of people have lost a lot of money in data, a lot of companies have come and gone in the data business….. They have predicted big business in moving data and the big business has not eventuated and some of those companies are no longer around."

"One of the prime promises of 3G is to move larger and larger lumps of data. But it is not insignificant that many of the great predictions of this technological age – and I use the paperless office as one – have simply not been true. And I would lodge in similar vein the great predictions about how much better digital communications is than analogue communications. It is as invalid as the statement about the paperless office."

New, better, different?

Some observers have pointed out that many of the claimed advantages of digital technologies such as Tetra are really just the advantages of a trunked radio system. "Of course they are", agrees Sir Angus, spiritedly. "This is a thing that makes me angry, because the digital proponents are saying, hey, we’ve got something new, better and different. Rubbish! You’ve got something different. MPT started in 1986, and so it has had some 15 years of debugging. If somebody offered you a brand-new computer program versus one that you’ve had for five years and you know is free of bugs, which one would you buy, if they were doing the same thing?

"It would be true to say right now that they Tetra technology is not a proven, bug-free, guaranteed reliable on a day-to-day basis, working system."

"It’s a bit lunatic really, judged from a cool, calm, commercial point of view, because it has been foisted on the analogue PMR industry, which is a substantial industry, performing a good, honest, reliable, necessary, commercial function. And to foist it – there, I use that word – on to the users in all its inessential complexity is a bit of a nonsense."

"Right now we’re doing a very large scheme in Ireland which involves five sites and about 1200 terminals, for a very large bus company. Now, those are the typical sort of people who, five years ago, would have said ‘we’ll wait for digital’. But these large companies are now beginning to say that Tetra is taking a long time to develop."

Goodbye to all that

A few years ago, Tait was actively involved in the ETSI standardisation work and in its own Tetra development programme (see panel, above) but it terminated the project in order to concentrate on analogue mobile radio, including MPT trunking. However, Sir Angus keeps an open mind about a possible return to digital.

"I’m prepared to believe that, inside five years, whatever the right digital answer is will become apparent. Right now, we’ve drawn back from Tetra because we do not believe it’s the right answer. We have no doubt whatever that there is a digital answer and right now there are probably that many other proponents, that many other options. I don’t know."

‘Kidding themselves’

"But in the meantime, the analogue world will carry on vigorously and aggressively, living in the face of this development situation around digital. The smoke will clear and it is entirely feasible that in that time digital will be discarded. It’s entirely feasible."

"Right now, the digital guys are kidding themselves that they have a place with their technology to sell competitively in the medium-sized market, the medium to small market. They will engage in hype – they’ve got to because they’ve made an enormous investment. A company that need not be named, but it’s not far away from here, to our certain knowledge has spent, in the history of that company, over ￡ 100 million on the development of Tetra. The money men must sit there shaking their heads thinking ‘when will we ever get our money back?’ – and the short answer is ‘you never will’.

"I think that’s a bit sad in some ways, because that surely means that it was ill-conceived from the outset, if the technological step was so great that it required ￡ 100 million before you even begin to get any return on your investment. Warranted, if you’re going to have 10 million subscribers…. but there’s not ever going to be 10 million subscribers in this country; 100,000 to 200,000, maybe. And so you could regard the whole conceptual proposal of the ETSI-inspired Tetra as being ill-informed as to what the real prospect were.

‘Dumb and daft’

"And I warm to the theme a little, because, when it was put together, it was never foreseen what the magnitude of the cellular market would be. It seems a bit dumb, and a bit daft, and a bit poorly judged, that millions of pounds are spent by committees and/or subsequent development organisations in providing equipment for that small bite.

"The people who are doing it will, of course, say, that in developing the equipment for this larger cellular market, we learned enough that we could direct our energies with advantage into this small variation."

"But at the moment there are only two players. Traditionally, in the land mobile radio world, there were many players and it was hot and competitive and it kept the prices down, and the customer got a good deal. If the cost of entry into the digital land mobile world, to satisfy this relatively small part of the market, if the cost entry is so high that the small players will never go in there, that could conceivably bring about the total demise of the land mobile market. That’s entirely feasible."

Dedicated systems

"I genuinely believe, and I’m not just saying this because I’m desperate, I do genuinely believe that there is, and there always will be, a place for dedicated, small systems to a specific requirement – where I’m covering a site of 100 acres and I’ve got 50 trucks and I want to control the things in a tight little network."

"The cellular man will say, I can do that for you. But it’s going to cost you a damn sight more money than putting up your own network, which might cost a few thousand pounds, but after that the running costs are zilch."

DON’T BE TAKEN IN BY THE HYPE!

What is Sir Angus Tait’s message to all those mobile radio users who are feeling the pressure to switch to digital systems?

"First of all, the simple message is don’t be taken in by the hype. Spend some time and find out what the facts really are, because, with the state of digital PMR technology right now, the most cost-effective solution in land mobile communications is a trunked analogue network.

"To qualify that statement further, there is, so far as I know, no readily available small to medium-sized, cost-effective, digital trunked network that you can buy off the shelf and put into service. Now, if somebody rings up here tomorrow and says, I want a trunked network that will cover 200 cabs or 200 buses, and it will involve a couple of sites and some engineering work, we can talk about that immediately and we can be putting it in place in a relatively short space of time."

But as I read it, you could not go to any of the digital PMR manufacturers with a comparable proposal and expect early delivery".

WAITING FOR TETRA….OR NOT

"We had a foray into digital and I’m not embarrassed to mention it", says Sir Angus Tait. "Ten years ago, we saw we’d been a long time in analogue and we said yes, digital is the logical progression from the present technology, and we started on the long road to Tetra. We invested a lot of money and almost fours years of work. And then we stopped – because the digital systems that are now being put in place in Europe and the UK have turned out very different from traditional PMR.

"They have developed as two streams: one is what I call a cellular lookalike, it looks more like a cellular phone. I will be courteous and avoid names, but there is a large network that has been built to emulate the Nextel network in America and – how can I choose my words? - it appears not to be growing at the rate that was anticipated. I have no comment as to why this should be so but it doesn’t do much to sustain the image that digital is better, goes further, costs less. And out of courtesy I would rest my case there."

"The other stream that is developing in Tetra is large public safety networks – the PSRCS. For a small company, which Tait is, that’s not our bag. And so we stopped Tetra, because, in the technology that was available through Tetra and the very large investment, we couldn’t see an end marketplace.

"As a traditional supplier in the PMR market, we’ve not seen any opportunity for the small to medium manufacturer, terminal supplier. There are many largeish organisations, traditional PMR users, which over the last five years have been getting round to replacing their structure, and a number of times we’ve gone to them and they’ve said, no, no, we’re going to wait for Tetra. But those people are beginning now to say we’re not going to wait for Tetra."

IN TRUST FOR THE FUTURE

Sir Angus Tait has settled his company’s future by taking the unusual step of restructuring it around a pair of charitable trusts.

"My title is chairman and, while I’m there everyday, if I fell off my perch, the place would go on!"" he said. "I’ve a CEO there, a chief technical officer and a management team, and I suppose I’m more there as a decoration than anything else!

"The reason I did this was that as I’ve aged, I’ve said to myself, what am I going to do with this thing? I have children – but modern children, when the old man is looking east, they are looking west, and they’re not very interested!

"I have modelled the company on the German Bosch model. You’re probably not aware that the German Bosch company is also a gigantic trust. It has some unusual and very effective features."

"They’ve done one very important thing, and we’ve copied this: they divided the thing into two trusts with separate members: no one can serve on both trusts. One trust has 99 percent of the shareholding and gets all the dividends, if any, because most of the money is going back into the pot, into r & d and building the place up. The guys there have no function other than to collect the money and to ensure that the company as a whole sticks to the instructions that I have left in my will with respect to what the company is about."

"The other one percent is owned by another trust. It doesn’t get any money at all – it’s only got one percent of the shareholding – but it appoints the directors and it is the key holding the thing altogether. This has worked very well as far as the Bosch company is concerned.

"The object is to try and put something in place which is going to last for some time. The law says it will last in perpetuity."

Durban Metro Council chooses Emcom/Tait Quasi Sync Radio Communications Technology

Caption: Les Thorpe, Director of Electronic Services of the Emergency Services Unit of the Durban Metro Council, inspects the equipment installed by Emcom Africa

Article and Interview Author: Mr Mike Tarr : Mobile 0825771031

The Greater Durban area has elevated itself to world class radio communications standards following the introduction of the latest state-of-the-art Quasi-Sync equipment in a partnership between the city’s Metro Council and Emcom Africa. Mr. Les Thorpe, Director of Electronic Services of the Emergency Services Unit of the Durban Metropolitan Council, said that In order to meet the Metro Electricity’s rapidly increasing need for reliable wide area radio communications, Durban Metro Council, the regional local government authority, had embarked upon a radio communication system replacement programme in 1996.

"After many months of investigation into radio system technologies, both analogue and digital, operational requirements and product availability, we selected the Tait Electronics Quasi-Sync system which is distributed locally by Emcom Africa (Pty) Ltd.

"The installation, which has now grown to rank among the largest Tait Electronics systems world-wide, utilises the principal of quasi-synchronous, multi-site, multi-channel operation with diversity reception, and operates over an area of more than 2 000 square kilometres."

The Greater Durban Quasi-Sync radio system covers the area from Zimbali Lodge up the North coast, down to Illovo in the South and Cato Ridge in the West.

Mr. Thorpe said that currently, the system has 13 four-channel sites linked back to a central control (at Durban Metro Electricity HQ), with a further three sites on the drawing board.

Mr Thorpe said that there were about 1 000 users in the area, but that would quadruple over the next 18 months.

"Additionally, with the successful implementation of the system, a further order has been placed for a second, near-identical system to support the Metro Council’s Fire and Emergency Services, and it is envisaged that yet a third system will be procured for the newly established Metro Police Services during the next 12 months".

Mr. Thorpe said the main advantages of the system were that the technology had inherent redundancy in that in the event of a complete failure at any one site, users will still receive quality communications due to planned overlap from adjacent sites. "In other words, there is a safety net in place", said Mr. Thorpe.

"Also, the system can be relatively easily expanded and additional sites introduced without reconfiguration or replacement of any of the existing equipment.

"Furthermore, the system makes efficient use of existing conventional VHF subscriber equipment, e.g. ‘walkie-talkies’/portables and mobile two-way radios, obviating the need to replace these devices at great cost. Lastly, the system has proved to be very reliable and relatively easy to maintain.

"It is also highly cost effective which means that Greater Durban ratepayers are ultimately benefiting from this system".

Mr. Ron Farnham, Senior Contracts Manager at Emcom said the system had proved to be very successful and his company was looking forward to installing the second system for Fire and Emergency Services.

Should you require more information please contact:

Mr Ron Farnham – Senior Contracts Manager

Comment from Emcom Africa:

• The Cape Metro Council has recently ordered radio system infrastructure to the value of-R50 million.
• Durban Metro Council has spent +-R6 million to date with a further +-R6 million earmarked for the last phase totalling +- R12 million.
• Users of the Cape Metro Council radio system will not be able to use existing handheld portable and mobile two-way radios and will have to purchase specialised two-way radios at approximately three times the price of standard two-way radios.
• Users of the Durban Metro Council radio system will be able to use their existing two-way radios.
• Durban Metro Council Electronics Services has been extremely successful in containing costs without compromising radio communications standards.
• When the Durban Metro Radio System is completed, it will be one of the largest Tait Quasi-Sync systems in the world.
• The Durban Metro Radio System is used for wide area mobile and portable communications between field staff and the control centre and is an immediate from of wireless communication, no dialling of numbers and waiting for the called party to answer.
• Durban Metro Electronics Services, in our opinion is a credible and very professional department. It has been a pleasure to interface with professionals who know what they are talking about.

Tait Orca Portables help Hollywood scale VERTICAL LIMIT

Tait Electronics provided a mobile communications system to the production crew for the movie VERTICAL LIMIT, which is about a daring rescue of climbers from the Himalayan mountain K2.

The system comprised seven Tait T800 repeaters, 204 Orca Elan portables, 21 Orca Excel portables and 21 T2020 mobiles. The Tait system provided comms for the entire seven months of filming.

Established Hollywood film company, Mountain High Productions, was so impressed with the performance of the portables during pre-production, that the use of some Tait radios was written into the script.

See Vertical Limit (including the Tait Orca Portables) at a movie house near you!

It’s always better on the big screen!