Irish Red Cross uses TETRA during three-day Longitude Festival

The Irish Red Cross Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Unit joined the Irish National Digital Radio Service (NDRS) (TETRA) network in June 2016 taking full advantage of the voluntary ambulance service tariff.

This very busy unit of the Red Cross provides medical cover for the summer concerts in Marley Park, a 121 hectares (300 acres) suburban public park located in Rathfarnham in Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown, Ireland and about nine kilometres from Dublin city centre and most recently providing cover at Kodaline ,The Stone Roses and the Longitude Festival spanning 2 weekends in July.

Andrew Patton from the Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Unit speaks of their experience using the Tetra network for sole communications during the 3 day event for the first time.

"We had a very positive experience on a number of different fronts. Having high quality radios which worked straight out of the box, without having to set up repeaters / base units etc made life very easy for us co-ordinating the event. The coverage in Marlay Park was excellent which meant our volunteers had a constant line of communication with our Radio Controller ensuring their safety and enabling us to rapidly dispatch Response Teams to patients when required.

The fantastic range of the Tetra radios is something we haven’t experienced before. Being able to communicate with our Ambulance crews when they left the Marlay Park site transporting patients to hospital, was extremely helpful in managing our ambulance resources. It was also very reassuring to know that the Tetra network runs completely independent of the public mobile networks, so that if a serious incident had occurred at the event causing an overload on the mobile networks our radios would not have been affected."