Technologies

Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA)

Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) is a digital trunked radio standard for professional and business users and was developed in Europe to replace MPT1327 analogue radio and other land mobile radio systems.

TETRA provides digital secure press-to-talk (PTT), group calls and point-to-point speech calls, status, short data service and IP packet data service.

TETRA is widely used by the Emergency Services on regional and national networks throughout Europe and the the rest of the world.  In the UK Airwave operates the national TETRA service for the Police, Fire, Ambulance and other public safety users.

Xlocate and TETRA

Xlocate works with TETRA with radios that have an integrated GPS receiver for transmitting location updates - this allows vehicle fitted radios and hand-portable radios issued to staff to be tracked in real-time on the Xlocate service.

Existing/legacy TETRA mobile radios that do not have an integrated GPS receiver can be connected to an add-on vehicle tracking unit such as the Thorcom MCU500e via the PEI connector.

Read about Vehicle Tracking and Workforce Location for the Emergency Services and Healthcare sectors.

Supported TETRA radios

TETRA radios with integrated GPS receivers that implement and of the following:

• ETSI Location Information Protocol (LIP) to TS 100 392-18-1
• Motorola Location Resuqest-Response Protocol (LRRP)
• NMEA ASCII protocol

This includes current GPS enabled radios from Motorola such as the MTM800, MPT850, Sepura SRM/SRG3500, SRP3500, SRH3500, Nokia/EADS THR880/880i and more.

Older radios such as the Motorola MTM700 series, Cleartone CMD9000 series and Sepura SRM2000 non-GPS enabled radios can be used with the Thorcom MCU500e.

Infrastructure connection

Xlocate can interface directly to Motorola Dimetra-P and Dimerta-IP networks using a connection to the Short Data Router (SDR).

Connections to Damm Cellular and EADS (Nokia) TETRA are under active development

Mobile terminate connection

For deployments of smaller systems (typically 1-50 mobiles) a fixed mobile can be employed to terminate the connection, ie. receive the location updates from the units being tracked.