The ultimate public safety vehicle unveiled at TETRA World Congress

Motorola Solutions unveiled what it calls ‘the ultimate patrol vehicle’ at last week’s TETRA World Congress (TWC) 2012 in Dubai.

The fully operational police car demonstrated the possibilities of the latest innovations in TETRA, TETRA Enhanced Data Services (TEDS) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) communications technology.

Motorola says the ultimate patrol vehicle is the result of years of simulation, usability studies and field research and incorporates the latest technologies and integrated controls to enable streamlined decision-making and actions by officers on the street.

The car has easy-to-reach controls with key functions tied to single button presses or simple voice commands. Its workstation runs applications such as automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) and real-time video streaming over LTE and TEDS to “empower and protect officers to a level that has never been seen before”.

“Motorola conducted years of research together with end users in patrol cars, who have highlighted to us the importance of intuitive technology in incident response,” said Tom Quirke, vice-president and general manager, TETRA Global Organisation, Motorola Solutions.

“We have learnt that the safety as well as the effectiveness of emergency responders can be significantly improved when critical information is delivered to them in an automatic and intuitive way. In the car environment, this means implementing vehicle controls that are integrated and easy to use – so that actions flow quickly and intuitively, requiring little thought during incident response. The ultimate patrol car at TWC 2012 demonstrated the latest innovations in TETRA, TEDS and LTE in one car to achieve a more secure, intuitive experience for frontline officers.”

Motorola also unveiled its new TETRA MTP3000 handheld radio series that it says has the highest receiver sensitivity in the market and will redefine industry standards in user safety and ease-of-use and also demonstrated the first public safety LTE device, LEX700, in the region. Motorola is driving the development of LTE networks, devices, applications and services with live public safety networks around the globe that provide first responders with live video, data and mission-critical applications.

APD Communications showcased the next generation of its integrated communication control solution (ICCS), CORTEX 7, at TWC 2012.

Among the new features is social media integration, giving operators access to multiple sources of information, including live news feeds and instantaneous social media updates, helping to optimise decision-making in the control room.

Social media has become an increasingly important tool for intelligence gathering by the emergency services, with many using Twitter especially to communicate with communities and to give control room operators trend information on critical incidents.

“In an emergency services control room every second can have far-reaching consequences, which is why CORTEX 7 benefits from having so many time-saving enhancements,” said Simon Read, head of product management.

Following the success of CORTEXremote in the field, CORTEX 7 will have full support for tablet devices and also features a real-time customised interface and multi-touch screen that includes the ‘gesture’ functionality such as ‘pinch to zoom’ found on tablet devices.

Cassidian and Asia Pacific Satellite communications Inc. (APSI) announced they have started pre-interoperability (IOP) tests between TETRA networks from Cassidian and ATP7000 TEDS modems from APSI. The cooperation aims to develop TETRA and TEDS-enabled modem products that can address the critical data transfer needs of a range of industries.

Cassiadian has already taken a further step in multi-vendor interoperability by successfully completing private IOP testing of the Motorola TEDS-capable mobile terminal on Cassidian’s TEDS-capable infrastructure.

It paves the way for the first multi-vendor TEDS IOP certific