Wide-ranging topics at TETRA congress

TETRA is a radio system that is being widely used around the world in all sorts of applications. An opportunity to talk about these applications and the technology involved, and to display some of the latest equipment, was at the TETRA World Congress in Singapore.

Here, more than 2300 attendees visited the 80-plus companies and organisations that were showing their wares and listened to more than 150 speakers present papers on a large range of topics.

TETRA is being used by an increasing number of railway companies worldwide in a bid to remain competitive against road transport and some of the users to which the technology is being applied were covered in various presentations.

In France, this system is being used to control shunting and signalling using RFID while the St Petersburg metro is developing video applications. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, unattended train operations are being developed on the MTR system.

Aviation was not forgotten as TETRA systems have been installed in several European airports.

WiMAX and TETRA seem to be becoming good friends as one paper discussed 'Developing Broadband PMR through the Integration of TETRA and WiMAX' while another looked at the experiences of the Zaragoza police in similar trials.

The congress was broken into streams that covered public safety and defence, transport, preparing for large events and incidents, commercial networks, future TETRA including broadband and IP, innovation and complementary technologies, energy and industry and interoperability.

The exhibitors included familiar names in Australia such as Rohde & Schwarz, Zetron and Motorola. Many companies used the event as an opportunity to launch new products and announce contracts and installations.