Case Studies - Trunked Radio
United States Steel - Heavy Industry
The Midwest Plant in Portage, Indiana, a finishing facility that operates as part of Gary Works. The site is situated about 10 miles east of Gary, Indiana. Sheet and tin products are finished at Midwest, serving customers in the automotive, construction and container markets. This plant consists of nearly 1 million square feet of building under roof and over 3 square miles of lakefront property. |
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The Project Brief.
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United States Steel, Midwest Division, was operating the plant with many non-repeater channels, providing segregated group communications with limited plant wide and inter group abilities. Coverage into basement areas was nearly impossible with this simplex type of operation. In addition coverage from outside of the buildings to the inside for many of the plant wide services was impossible. A plan for emergency communications needed to be implemented allowing for all radios to be communicated with should the need arise. |
Radio Coverage is everything..
Coverage inside a plant of this magnitude possed a unique problem. The production of the steel creates a very difficult RF environment. NIC overcome this problem by intalling specially designed antennas and cell extenders.
MPT1327 The smart choice..
The overall system has been built around a Fylde MPT1327 trunking system. This protocol was chosen as it provides the most flexible platform for future growth and expansion. Additionally, the feature sets available directly allow all of the functionality expected by the customer to be implemented. MPT1327 as a system has built in redundancy and grace degradation as a standard. This as a standard allows for the system should any component fail, continue to operate. Additionally, MPT1327 and the associated cell extenders are only available in the MPT1327 trunking format.
Radios used at the plant
See NIC's recommended Kenwood radios used by US Steel Portable Mobiles
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Emergency CommunicationsFor emergency communications the system was designed to allow communications with any segregated operational group/division or the entire organization. The origination of this type of group call is only available from certain management radios and the Message Handling Dispatcher (MHD). The MHD provides a static point of connectivity for the safety
departments around the facility. |
Remote system diagnostics
The repeaters, base station, mobile and portable equipment has be chosen from Kenwood Communications for their high reliability. The repeaters have external metering and alarms available to report the health of their operation directly into the Fylde MPT1327 controllers. These alarms and monitoring points are available for processing at the central control point by Fylde designed Syscon.
High quality R56 Site installations
NIC Technologies endevors to be the best installers in the business! This means all NIC installations are to the highest possible standards. R56 refers to the highest standard in site installations set out by Motorola.
Overview of features used by US Steel
Speech Services
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• Person to Person calls. • Person to Group. • Mobile radio to public telephone network (PSTN). • Mobile radio to private telephone exchange (PABX). |
Data Services
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• Data message to individual radio units or groups. • Text messaging to individual radio units or groups. • E-mail Gateway to radio units. |
Emergency Features
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• Single button activation.
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