Team Information

Team Communication

In the last year the most exciting things to happen to our radios are that we lost one, broke two and had some new ones fitted to the vehicles. We use PMR 446 radios for informal communication, for example when a party has to search a forest they might split into two to clear parallel tracks more efficiently. These radios are also useful for communicating between crag top and crag bottom or doing a line search in thick woodland, in fact any situation that requires 'refined shouting'. This type of traffic does not go through Control, leaving the air space clear for vital messages. Anyway, we have lost one of 20 such sets in two years of crawling around in brambles and peat hag, which is disappointing but it might turn up yet.

The two we broke were Police radios, which are on long term loan, kindly, from North Yorkshire Police. These Tetra sets allow us to talk to the Police directly or to their Air Support helicopter and are particularly useful for 'talking round corners'. Radios normally work line of site, though reflection and diffraction effects can improve matters. Since the Police sets use a cellular phone system it allows us to communicate with black-spots as long as they are within network range. We didn't exactly break two of these but a button seized up on one and a PIN was entered incorrectly in another requiring a trip to Police HQ to be unlocked.

Our normal VHF Team radios are Kenwood TK2170 and have proved all but bombproof in the field. Our policy is to carry them in chest harnesses from Wildtalk.com which allow us to dispense with speaker mic's and the problems associated with cable weaknesses. That way the radio is to hand even when you have dispensed with your sac to barrow-boy a stretcher down a crag. We have the software and leads so were easily able to accommodate a band-plan revision in March which meant some channels had to be reprogrammed. A generous donation of £700 has recently allowed us to upgrade 3 old Motorola vehicle sets to Kenwoods so that our displays are now synced across the fleet. This makes issuing instructions to go to another channel much simpler and has allowed us to keep the old Motorola sets just for monitoring the Calling Channel.

We continue to use pagers as our main system for calling out the Team but have just implemented Message Distribution Service as a back-up. Vodapage transmitter problems have resulted in missed pages meaning that some members left a steaming Sunday dinner and drove half an hour through fog to find that the Team had been stood down. MDS sends the page message to your mobile with the added advantage that the message is retained if you are out of network coverage. This also means that in the summer you can go out and about without wearing a utility belt or sporting a manbag.

Radios are an essential tool in getting resources in and the casualty out, the donations over the years from members of the public funded our £10,000 system. Thank you.

Louis Hume - Communications Officer - Cleveland Search and Rescue Team