Rayle EMC to Join Statewide TETRA Network in Georgia Provided by Powertrunk

Rayle EMC, a member-owned electric cooperative responsible for providing electrical power to the rural areas of ten northeast Georgia counties, has selected PowerTrunk to extend the Diverse Power TETRA Network in order to bring coverage and mission critical communications into their area of operations.

This expansion will allow the energy utility cooperative to join the statewide TETRA network deployed in Georgia to increase their performance, reliability, and safety, providing employees the capacity to coordinate daily operations and to coordinate with other electric cooperatives when necessary, such as in emergency and storm restoration situations, by means of a mission-critical grade radio communications system.

Not only will Rayle EMC benefit from improved voice communications, but also from data capabilities that exclusively the TETRA standard can provide, with which they will monitor the location and safety of their fleets through an integrated web AVL solution that receives the GPS coordinates directly from the TETRA subscriber terminals.

The cooperative will also acquire SRG3900 mobile radios and STP9000 hand-portable radios. This will provide a combination of ruggedness, ease of use, and audio quality - especially important in high noise environments - and the SRG3900 mobile devices will complement their operations by enabling DMO (Direct Mode Operation) gateway functionality to extend hand-portable coverage to lower user density areas.

Rayle EMC becomes the 5th cooperative to join the Georgia statewide TETRA Network, which continues to show growth as even more cooperatives consider replacing their older legacy radio systems with digital TETRA technology. This latest addition to the cooperative family in Georgia increases the number of sites of the network, with more than 60 base station sites in the UHF band and over 2000 subscribers, with an overall coverage greater than 65% of the State of Georgia. Local support for the network expansion is provided by Dean’s Commercial Two-Way, who also provides technical services for Diverse Power and the other electric cooperatives of the statewide system.

“Rayle EMC is excited to have PowerTrunk and Dean’s Commercial Two Way provide its next land mobile radio system. This solution will allow us to significantly upgrade two-way radio communication functionality and to employ data applications such as GPS tracking and SCADA. It will also allow us to become a part of the Georgia Cooperative Tetra Network. This is important to us because it will provide economic efficiencies through shared resources and promote collaboration with existing member cooperatives which will help us get the most out of this investment,” said Jim Bennett, Manager of Engineering for Rayle EMC.

Jim Mattox, PowerTrunk VP of Strategic Development, added, “The addition of Rayle EMC to the family of electric cooperatives using TETRA technology enhances the ability of all the cooperatives to respond during emergencies in the region. In today’s information driven environment, TETRA provides world class critical communications for both voice and data in day to day operations and during emergencies.”