Clacton Airshow Report

Essex RAYNET recently supported the annual Clacton Airshow this week. Providing Emergency Resilience Radio
Communications for the District EPO, between key strategic locations in a pre-deployed state. Typically, this event
attracts around 250,000 visitors to the town of Clacton On Sea, across the 2 Day Event.

15 Operators across the 2 days, volunteered approx. 350 hours to this event – not including all the planning meetings
and engineering that is involved in an event of this size.

This year saw us for the first time, deploy the use of both DMR Timeslots via our 2x Dual Mode 70cm DMR Repeaters
(1 primary and 1 backup repeater), allowing us to run a Routine Net on 1 Slot and an Encrypted Net on the remaining
slot – to allow us to pass sensitive information at the request of the User Service.

We deployed the following equipment:
2x Motorola DR3000 Dual Mode DMR Repeaters (1x Primary and 1x Backup)
2x Motorola DM4600 UHF Mobiles for Net Control (1x for Routine and 1 for Secure)
6x Motorola DP3400 Handhelds (For Secure Traffic)
Mixture of Members owned DP3400s, DP3600s and DP4800s Handhelds (For Routine and Secure Traffic)
Icom ID-5100 @ Net Control for D-Star
Icom ID-52 and Icom IC-92 for D-Star
Icom LTE IP501/503 and IP730D LTE Handhelds (Backup to RF)
Icom IP501 Mobile for Net Control (Backup to RF)
Icom ICF-5122D for Monitoring local RF Systems on VHF

This approach allowed us to ensure that any priority Radio Traffic would always get through, even while the other
slot was in use for Routine Traffic. This structured approach to running a Dual Net Control, worked very well and
with minimal additional infrastructure to facilitate this.

We also took this opportunity, thanks to the use of 2/70 Duplexers, to trial D-Star Photo and Text Chat via the Icom
RS-MS1A App used via a Bluetooth or Cable. Connection to a D-Star Radio, which worked well on VHF, allowing us to
send and receive Images/Text when the 3G/4G was crippled due to Network overload.

Our Operators were approached on multiple occasions by those with Scanners or Radios, all keen to know what we
were using and how they might listen in.

A detailed article into our journey into DMR and why Secure Communications are becoming a ‘MUST HAVE’ will
follow.

2E0XTA County Controller & Engineering Officer for Essex RAYNET