PSCE conference will discuss emergency comms

Public Safety Communication Europe will hold a two-day conference in Athens on 23–24 November, covering a range of topics of interest to the public safety community.

As well as sessions on natural disasters and emergency responses, two sessions will be of particular interest to communications professionals: PPDR Broadband worldwide, and How can telecommunications improve security in transport?

In addition to speakers from within the PSCE organisations, the conference will also be addressed by TJ Kennedy, president of the US FirstNet agency, and Gerrit Riemer from General Motors.

Markus Rauch from the Civil Protection Agency South Tyrol will talk about ‘Self-reliant paging in South Tyrol’.

The province of South Tyrol in Italy has prepared its communication systems to deal with natural disasters or extended power outages, through the introduction of a disaster-proven, encrypted alerting solution. That solution includes:

• A highly resilient POCSAG alerting network for volunteer and professional intervention forces. It is fully redundant and offers several fall-back modes. Even if the entire backhaul and a number of base stations are out of service, the entire region can be alerted in 10 seconds. In case of power blackouts, generators provide emergency power for at least two weeks, allowing the network to be operational when other communication channels are out of service.
• Alerting devices for the intervention forces that are easy to wear, very robust and highly sensitive for good indoor coverage, offering battery autonomy of up to 40 days continuous operation with a single AA battery. If required in the future, a backchannel for feedback options could be added.

The PSCE conference will be preceded on 22 November by a free, one-day workshop on ‘Decision Support Tools for Effective Health Emergency Management’.

More details about both events are available at the PSCE website.