Wellington International Airport needed to integrate its many disparate radio systems to a single system, as part of a major upgrade to its Operations Room.
Wellington Airport has multiple organisations performing mission critical tasks alongside each other, using different radio systems. These radio systems needed to be monitored efficiently and dynamically at new consoles in the new shared Operations room. The channels are shared across organisations, including barging for emergency scenarios. The system needed to be redundant, to continue running during disaster scenarios and with minimal operational downtime. Finally radio communications needed to be 100% available during the upgrade period.
In addition, an aging analog system for emergency from communications from the Airways control tower, needed to be replaced and integrated to the operations control room environment.
Ignition Networks was able to meet this challenge by utilising as much of Wellington Airport's existing IT infrastructure as possible, and upgrading and expanding only where is was required. Motorola WAVE 5000 radio over IP system was deployed and various interfaces replaced. Each disparate radio systems was integrated using a variety of techniques including Donor Radios and wireline IP integration.
All organisations' radio systems (Airport Operations, Aviation Security, Airband, and Air New Zealand) are now integrated into the Wave environment.
Wellington Airport's existing Emergency Barging System was completely replaced with a new redundant IP based emergency solution designed by Ignition Networks, integrating the voice hotline between the control tower and airport operations, PA announcements in the firestation, physical triggers for firestation automation, and barging over the radios system. This was all integrated to WAVE.
The airport Dimetra Tetra radio system, along with martine, fire, airband and civil defense radios were initially integration. Later Air New Zealand's Capacity Max radios and AvSecs radios were also integrated. A total of 24 active channels can now be accessed from a single operator PC or manager smart-phone. This now allows the fully radio functionality performed by the operations team, to be performed from any location on a laptop device - including emergency dispatch and interagency communication. Redundancy was achieved by designing in fail over servers at multiple locations on the airport premises.
"Their knowledge of radio systems and expertise in communication peripherals has been invaluable to us. They have not shield away from complex or difficult situations. Instead they have worked methodically and diligently through the problems to arrive at an excellent outcome for all parties.
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Ignition also enabled cellular remote monitoring of all airport radio systems via the Wave mobile app, allowing management and key off-duty personal to maintain situational awareness while off-site.
The entire solution was rolled out by Ignition Networks, ontime and inside budget, with no downtime while the Airport continued operation.