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The guest writer for this edition of Reach is JOE HALANEN, who has been involved with Airwave since 2005 when a group was set up by the London Local Authorities to evaluate resilient telecommunication systems. Since 2006 he has been a member of various nationwide groups developing Airwave training packages and is now Chairman of the Multi Agency Airwave User Group (MAAUG), having previously been its Head of Training. Joe works for the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames as Resilience Manager and continues to train staff from various agencies in the use of the Airwave Service.

icture the scene. It’s early summer 2008 and I’m with a group of other Local Authority emergency planning staff at an event on reservoir emergency plans hosted by the Environment Agency. During a break the conversation turns to radio communication and then on to Airwave. Having been using the Network since 2005 I was keen to see what colleagues from other areas thought of it. Well, I was a little shocked and exasperated by some of the responses. ‘It has no use for us’ being one, ‘RAYNET works just ne for us’ being another but the most unexpected one was ‘But Airwave’s just for the

emergency services’! Sadly, that latter view was commonly held at that time, and did no favours whatsoever to those trying hard to help the non-blue light users. Since at least 2005, organisations other than the blue light emergency services have been using the Airwave Service. Local Authorities, being on the OFCOM sharers’ list for many years were early users of the system. Some started with arrangements with their local Police force to use their terminals in the event of a major incident. Whilst this did represent early multi-agency use outside the emergency services such arrangements did have a number of shortcomings. First there was the issue that they were not in regular use, meaning that users did not become sufciently familiar with the handsets and had no opportunity to identify any issues before an emergency struck. Then there was the problem of how agencies could be alerted about an emergency during a communications failure. It would have been no use phoning someone to tell them to switch on their resilient voice system when the radios were safely locked in a cupboard at the county hall! Finally, there were question marks over whether such arrangements were permitted under the Airwave Service code of conduct.

In late 2005 it was becoming clear that a more formal approach was needed if non-blue light agencies

were to become successful users of the Airwave Service. In London, a group of Local Authority staff representing all 33 of the capital’s Boroughs decided to look into the issue of resilient communications. Their work looked at a number of types of systems from public networks to satellite phones and they produced a report which recommended that every Borough sign up to the Airwave Service. For the vast majority of Boroughs this was the Airwave Direct product and all Boroughs bought into the service (see opposite page). Coupled with this was a comprehensive set of protocols, such as callsigns and shared talkgroups allowing London Boroughs to communicate effectively with each other- an early form of interoperability. A user group community called the Local Authority Airwave User Group (LAAUG) was formed to represent the users to Airwave, the emergency services and government. Over time this group expanded to offer membership to all non-blue light users and is now known as the Multi Agency Airwave User Group (MAAUG), but still has the same aims.

It was also realised that with all London Boroughs now using the same equipment and protocols then a common training package was needed. Commercially available training did not always fully meet the needs of non-blue light users and might not for example take