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A Day In The Life...
An ex-ship’s radio officer, Brian Faulkner has been the Radio Communication Manager at the Royal National Lifeboat Institution’s headquarters in Poole, Dorset, for ten years. In this the first of a new series charting the day-to-day lives of information management movers, users and shakers, Brian speaks to BAPCO Journal about the many communications-related projects the RNLI is currently involved in.
I have three different roles really. I work on the operational side and I ensure along with my colleagues that life boat, crew and stations have the best possible equipment, whether radio or navigational.
When we need a new piece of equipment, a statement of requirements is put together that is passed on to the technical department, and then we receive samples that we trial with crews. I liaise between the technical and the operational side.
The second part of my role is looking after the crew paging system. When I first joined RNLI there was a combination of many different paging systems – each with their own problems – so we decided to have our own bespoke system.
We went out to tender and Arqiva (then known as NTL) got the contract to build and install the system with Multitone pagers.
They started to install the system in 2000 and now it is about half way through its life. At the moment we are reviewing whether we need to rip it out and put something else in, but as it is working well, a little tweaking here and there is probably all that we need to do. We are also currently rolling out seven and a half thousand new Swissphone pagers, and this should be finished next year.
The third role is keeping up to date with what is going on with the world of electronics, and we sit on various committees such as the radio spectrum group for the 2012 Olympic Games, chaired by Ofcom. This committee has been set up to decide whether there are requirements for extra spectrum for the Games. As far as we are concerned we don’t need any more spectrum but it is predicted that there will be around two and a half thousand spectator boats floating around, as well as cruise liners anchored in the bay as accommodation for the athletes.
Setting up new stations
We have an ongoing programme of upgrading lifeboat stations – basically knocking down the old ones and building new ones. All the equipment has to be moved from A to B, and the lines have to be moved on the same day as Arqiva turns up. There is a lot of liaison between BT and Arqiva. A couple of weeks ago we had a problem with a BBC transmitter aerial that was in the way of the rigger. He could not climb near it because of the high power. We finally managed to get a one-hour window of opportunity from the BBC who agreed to turn the power down. We prayed that it wouldn’t be windy for when the rigger turned up. It can get fraught and it usually happens on a Friday afternoon.
Last year we opened up stations in Loch Ness and Dartmouth, so we had to set up a complete paging system for both stations. The process involves plotting a theoretical coverage on a map of where the boats are and where the volunteers live and work. Arqiva does the planning and liaises with the councils to get permission for setting up repeaters where there is no coverage.
Our repeaters are in churches; police stations; in Exmouth we are in the Royal Marines training camp; in Northern Ireland we are even on the roof of a bakery.
If we need to set up a repeater on someone’s premises, we contact the people and explain how a repeater is only the size of a small box, and that all we need is a 13amp socket which we install. Very few people turn us down and more often than not they don’t want us to pay rent. We have a licence agreement with each person, and Arqiva looks after that process.
Last year we were approached by South West Ambulance, whose pager coverage does not cover some coastal areas such as Kimmeridge. They wanted to latch onto our system and after much deliberation we decided to trial it with 10 pagers. That seems to be working OK.
Another project we are working on is rolling out TETRA onto the life boats on the Thames. We have crews in London and they have to be able to talk to the police, as many incidents involve people jumping off bridges, so we have had to buy TETRA radios. We’ll also need TETRA radios for the Olympics because the MCA will be using them.
Flood relief teams
We have three teams on 24-hour standby to go anywhere in the world to provide flood relief, and they have been as far as Mozambique. I had to provide the kit, and they have standard marine VHF handhelds and aircraft VHF, as well as medium frequency telephony and satellite kit.
We are going through the process of changing the MF kit and will be testing a military system used in Afghanistan and Iraq, built by Iridium. Called tactical networking, it uses low orbit satellites that allow a team leader to talk to – let’s say he has three boats – each boat individually or all three at once. The teams can also talk to each other, and even back to headquarters in Poole. We are carrying out trials with this later in the year
We are also looking to provide them with Airwave radios because the teams often work with local fire and rescue services, such as during the floods in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire.
Additional initiatives
I also get involved in smaller projects. In Hoylake (Merseyside) we are building a new station, and the shore crew wanted to try a new way of heating it up. It has been set up in such a way that when the pagers go off, the booster of the heating system automatically comes on – something that is already done with outside sodium lights on pontoons etc, which take some time to warm up.
The fundraising department are very happy with our ‘virtual pager’ that we launched last year. You can download an image of an old Multitone pager which sits on your computer, and when a crew has launched you get the message. You can program it for all sorts of situations, and it goes off and makes a noise, but there is a delay of 20-30 minutes.
On the website we also have “Out on a Shout”, which is a map, linked to the paging system, showing which crews have launched where.
Vital statistics
- On average the RNLI launches 23 times per day
- In 2006 8,015 people were rescued, and 236 lives saved
- RNLI lifeguards were called to nearly 9,500 incidents in 2006, saving 63 lives
- The RNLI has over 330 lifeboats in 2230 stations
- Approximately 340 seasonal lifeguards
- There are around 7,500 volunteers nationwide
