Case Studies - Trunked Radio
Solae - Manufacturing Plant
Solae’ is a division of DuPont specializing in the refinement and processing of Soybeans for food preparation. Solae’ is located in Remington, IN and employs over 100 people with a manufacturing facility covering ½ mile. The site is comprised of many steel buildings, out-lots and operating departments. |
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The Project Brief.
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Solae's Remington facility required the new radio system to acheive multiple operating groups, telephone interconnect to its existing Norstar telephone system, emergency communications, voice annunciated alarming, severe weather alerting and intrinsically safe radios. The site also called for employees, without radios, within the plant and off-site to be able to communicate with radio users. The implelentation of a trunked radio system fulfilled their requirement. Allowing for future proof expansion capabilities to include data terminals and job despatch. |
MPT 1327 radio trunking in an explosive environment.
Intrinsically safe radios are capable of operating in explosive environments as Solae’ processes soybeans with Acetone, a highly volatile substance.
Radios used at the plant
See NIC's recommended Kenwood radios used at the plant Portable Mobiles
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Emergency Communications Fast organised evacuation if an Acetone release occurs was made possible by adding functionality into the radio programming allowing all radios to be brought into an emergency group. The voice annunciated alarming was made possible using a Zetron SentriVoice voice enunciator. The enunciator was configured to access the system through a Kenwood TK-880 radio. This radio was configured to access the system on a group set up as receive only for the portable radios. This allows the alarm to be heard, however, not causing the portables to remain on the alarm group, which would disrupt normal communications. |
Severe Weather Alerts
Weather alerting was necessary as the plant exists in
a rural
area. This area is rather prone to severe weather which includes tornado
activity. The weather receiver utilizes specific area message encoding.
This encoding
allows the receiver to remain muted until a specific programmed stream
of data is received. This stream is specific to area and type of weather
activity. The warning is broadcast to radio units through the trunking system.
Overview of features used at the plant:
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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