London joins ten other UK police forces in choosing the Motorola MTH800
Motorola today announced that the Metropolitan Police Service has chosen its MTH800 terminal for its officers to use on the nationwide TETRA communications network, Airwave. The Metropolitan Service is Britain’s largest policed force, with 31,637 officers covering an area of 620 square miles and a population of 7.2million.
Since it was launched in November 2003, the MTH800 has so far been chosen by eleven out of twelve police forces that have awarded contracts this year in the United Kingdom.
The Metropolitan Police Service, whose aim is to make London the safest major city in the world, chose the MTH800 after extensive testing and feedback from officers. As well as being reliable in all sorts of conditions and offering very high levels of encryption, the terminals will enable the Metropolitan Police to take advantage of new technologies to aid the forces responsiveness and efficiency as well as enhancing officer safety.
Ch Supt Peter Goulding, Chair of the Selection Board, said: “This announcement is really good news for all radio users in the Met. The selection process involved police officers and police staff from across the organisation covering operational, support and supply departments. A lot of work has gone into the last 8 months with manufacturers to develop and select our next generation of radios and deliver them into service. The Met has worked with manufacturers to push the technology boundaries for radios, ensuring that we can make the most of digital services now and in the future.”
The Metropolitan Police will use the flexibility of the MTH800 to fit in with their particular operational needs and work with Motorola to develop the features and applications the MTH800 has to offer. Gary Maughan, Motorola’s Director of Public Safety Terminal business in the UK said Motorola said, “We listened closely to Met’s requirements and developing the terminals capabilities to Met operational needs. This decision in favour of the MTH800 is superb news and represents a dedicated team effort from Motorola. To be able to announce The Met, Scottish forces, Kent, Norfolk and Northamptonshire in one week is phenomenal and follows an extensive, rigorous and very competitive tender process. We have learnt a lot during this time including the art of listening more carefully to our customers needs and we would like to thank the Met Police team for their decision.”
Colour display has a variety of operational uses
The most recent demonstrations of the MTH800 included the display of images captured on a simple digital camera and transmitted live to the terminal. The large, high definition colour display on the MTH800 enables a wide range of image types to be displayed with exceptional clarity, including mug shots, incident views, digital maps or specialised graphics such as Force logos. During Motorola evaluations the colour display performed extremely well in a variety of environments including the typical sodium lighting of city centres.
Additional features with safety in mind have been enhanced with colour. The battery level icon not only shows the state of charge left in the battery graphically but it changes colour as well. A fully charged battery is shown in green and, progressively, the icon will turn to red when a pre-defined low battery state is reached.
With security continuing to increase in importance, communication within police forces is key. Officers will use the MTH800 to communicate with each other and with the control room. As part of this, the Motorola solution will create over 3,000 talk groups that will be aligned to the Force’s operational units, increasing information sharing and speeding up communication within these groups. In addition, a function called ‘My Range’ will allow individual officers to create their own talk groups to share information – for example with officers who are on the beat in the same area or who are working on the same incident as them.
Location performance
Operational possibilities for the future are further enhanced with another of the terminal’s features – the integrated GPS receiver. In the future an officer’s location could be accurately plotted by control room staff in order to get a better idea of overall resource deployment. And, in conjunction with the emergency button that sends a high priority call to the control room, it will be possible to pinpoint an officer’s location accurately in order to send backup to the incident. The sensitivity of the GPS antenna produced excellent performance and location accuracy in tests carried out during recent trials.
Compatibility with future technology – the MTH800 has been designed to accept new software, in particular Java-based applications. This will mean that as new applications are developed, the software can be loaded on to the terminals, enabling officers to take full advantage of the latest technology.
Easy-to-carry – the lightweight design of the MTH800 makes it an easy addition to the existing equipment officers have to carry. It can be attached to an officer’s uniform or body armour in a variety of ways and the high quality microphones mean the officer’s voice will be heard, even when speaking very quietly. The display on the terminal can be turned 180° so that it can easily be read upside down if clipped to an officer’s shoulder.
Long battery life – the MTH800 has very low power consumption, creating a terminal with exceptional battery power that outlasts the usual ‘shift and a half’ expectation. This is particularly unusual for a terminal with a GPS receiver – most of which consume a great deal of power.