Among the latest products from the Danish infrastructure manufacturer Damm is its Rapid Deployable TetraFlex (RDT) package, a fully featured, preconfigured mobile TETRA system in a flyaway box. Suggested applications include handling emergencies such as road accidents, natural disasters and search-and-rescue operations in remote rural areas.

“It has up to two hours of battery power inside and it can be operated with the lid closed”, says Bettina Leth Johannsen, of Damm. “You have all the connectors behind and fan cooling. It’s running now! So within a few minutes you can be on the air. And you can just connect them together and even to a multi-site, like if you have bigger areas of catastrophe, like Haiti.”

But the main focus of Damm’s display was a wideband data capability for its TetraFlex network infrastructure, using IP technology to connect to fixed and mobile data networks, including 3G, LTE, CDMA, Wi-Fi, WiMax or even cable. “What we are doing is a full integration of wideband into TETRA, with full encryption and authentication, actually through any smartphone, tablet device or anything”, Ms Johannsen explains. “I would be able now to call the dispatcher or any other smartphone terminal connected to this or any TETRA terminal, in a group call or individual call, and I can do file transfer, video streaming, photo transfer, directly to the dispatcher.

“Now you can sit on your holiday in Malaysia or wherever and call into your TETRA network right away, directly from your smartphone.”

But there are serious uses for this capability, she continues – for example, in service with the Danish military in Afghanistan, it helps by bypassing insecure telephone lines. “They have problems with all their soldiers there wanting to call back home”, she says. “They have had a lot of threats against families in Denmark from the enemies down there. And now they can actually use a smartphone, calling through the TETRA network.”

The Damm technology supports numbering unification within a mixed population of devices, so that data terminals such as smartphones, tablets and notepads can communicate as fully integrated devices within the TetraFlex network.

Network bridge

Also new from the company is a group bridge, a means of interconnecting group calls with any other PMR network – analogue or digital, even another TETRA network. This can be used for rapid deployments when it is necessary to connect to an existing network. For example, in the mining industry, when external contractors are brought in, it will simply be possible to bridge the relevant talkgroups together.

Ms Johannsen adds that the bridge can also be used for managing a phased migration to a new TETRA installation. “We’ve had quite some interest from people not wanting to take the TETRA investment in one big step. They can partly migrate through this group bridge.”