Friday fragments - comms news from around the web for 30 May 2014

A round-up of the week's critical communications and public safety radio news for Friday, 30 May 2014.

Sepura acquires Fylde Micro. Sepura has acquired UK-based radio trunking company Fylde Micro. This is Sepura's third strategic acquisition in the last two years; the other two were Austrian TETRA supplier 3T and Helsinki-based applications developer Portalify.

M2M partnership. Thuraya and ViaSat are partnering to “develop and launch a dedicated machine-to-machine (M2M) platform combined with M2M specific products and commercial packages". The companies say M2M “will be a key growth engine for satellite services in the next few years".

Short-range radio workshop. The ITU will hold a workshop on 'Short-range Radio Devices and Ultra Wide Band' on 3 June. The aim is to “identify areas of spectrum that can be globally or regionally harmonized to facilitate the global adoption of SRD applications and their related technologies, including UWB. The workshop may also help identify activities which can lead to the inclusion of additional frequency opportunities for SRDs in Recommendation ITU-R SM.1896 on global and regional harmonisation of SRDs."

4G carrier aggregation in NZ. New Zealand telco Telecom has made carrier aggregation (CA) technology available on six of its 4G mobile sites.

DMR in anti-terrorism drill. An anti-terrorism drill was used to launch a new metro line in the Chinese city of Changsha. Local police, emergency responders and medicine departments use a Hytera trunked DMR Tier 3 system.

World Radiosport Team Challenge 2014. The World Radiosport Team Championship is a competition between two-person teams of amateur radio operators testing their skills to make contact with other amateurs around the world over a 24-hour period. WRTC2014 will include 59 competing teams from 29 qualifying regions around the world