A volunteer sea rescue network spread along an entire coastline, with base stations too remote to record individually. One recorder on the state RoIP network captured the lot.
The South Australian Sea Rescue Squadron is an all-volunteer service that has kept watch over the state’s boating public since 1960. Its bases in the Adelaide metropolitan area, Wirrina, Edithburgh and the Copper Coast, along with marine radio stations scattered along the coastline, keep a listening watch on the marine emergency channels.
The Issue
The state government’s VHF marine radio network covers the whole South Australian coastline. It carries boating condition broadcasts and coordinates sea rescue operations. Each remote base station connects to the statewide Radio over IP (RoIP) network through an Omnitronics IPR400 gateway.
The department responsible for the network needed a way to capture, record and monitor every base station’s transmissions on one secure network, without installing a recorder at each remote site.
The Solution
In June 2011 CallTech supplied a single Red Box recorder that captures every radio transmission on the RoIP network centrally. To get there, CallTech worked with Omnitronics to refine the recorder’s integration with the IPR gateways so the two products work together directly.
When Omnitronics released its DX-Altus digital radio management system and DRG-100 digital radio gateway in 2013, CallTech returned to the Omnitronics labs to test against them. That testing showed the Red Box recorder handles both analogue and digital radio on any Omnitronics RoIP network, not only the equipment in use at the time.
Every marine emergency channel on the state VHF network became recordable from one box, and the work with Omnitronics proved the recorder against both analogue and digital radio on any Omnitronics RoIP network - not just the devices in use at the time.