German mine upgrades TETRA

Vattenfall Europe Mining, in Cottbus, Germany, commissioned PBIT, a local reseller of Airbus Defence and Space, to modernise its company-wide TETRA digital radio network. This involved upgrading the existing switching technology by means of two DXT3 switches from Airbus Defence and Space.

Vattenfall owns and operates five of its own opencast brown coal pits and three coal-fired power plants in the Lusatia region in eastern Germany. Eight years ago, the company opted for a secure and standalone TETRA network from Airbus Defence and Space for these locations.

The network, which is made up of 26 transmitter sites and around 3000 users, was thus made fully redundant. At the same time, the existing TETRA technology was upgraded with the latest Release 7.0. This makes the Vattenfall site in eastern Germany the first user worldwide of Airbus Defence and Space’s new version of TETRA technology.

The modernised system offers features such as dual homing, which enables fully automatic operations at two switches. As part of the upgrade, some transmitter locations were migrated to the latest IP technology, which provides more flexible system architectures, a better overview of maintenance costs and access to technologies of the future, particularly in the field of high-speed data transmission and the seamless broadband migration that entails.