Saving lives at sea with vital communications We are providing the UK’s Maritime and Coastguard A gency with a fully integrated support service and reliable communicati ons infrastructure enabling it to continue safeguarding Britain’s coas ts and the seafaring community.

Preventing loss of life

The UK’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) works to prevent loss of life, improve maritime safety and protect the marine environment. It has some 150 remote radio sites around the country that cover the UK’s sea area and shoreline. The MCA provides the UK’s maritime distress and safety communications and has wide responsibilities for search and rescue, ship safety standards and pollution prevention – handling more than 13,000 emergency cases a year. For the search and rescue field alone, the MCA’s technical service co-ordinates a network of six Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres, 13 sub-centres and 64 sector bases.

Reliable communications infrastructure

Unsurprisingly, with such a big responsibility, the MCA must have a reliable communications infrastructure with access to fast, expert support and advice on resolving technical issues and migrating to new systems. Our Public Safety group has a long-term partnership with the MCA that guarantees this reliability.

We provide maintenance and management service support for the MCA network around mainland Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This includes preventive and routine maintenance as well as emergency call-outs. Specified response times depend on the

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severity of the problem – for example engineers are contracted to respond to an outage at a main site within six hours.

Our core team of technical specialists manages all day-to-day issues and directs our own workforce to resolve problems quickly around the country. We also installed the radio equipment in the MCA’s vehicles and have developed expertise in positioning private mobile radio (PMR) equipment in the Agency’s varied fleet.

A partner in change

When the MCA needed to bring about a strategically important change, we were on hand to provide technical support. A major part of the Agency’s work is generated by the high profile Channel Navigation Information Service. Based in Dover, the service monitors all shipping traffic in the Dover Straits, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. The service was replaced in 2003 and new functionality added.

As part of this process, and having maintained the MCA’s radio infrastructure for the previous 10 years, we were contracted as the technical partner for this change. We provided on on-site engineering support to ensure the smooth transition and running of the new Channel Navigation Information Service facility.

A key part of the enhanced functionality introduced was an updated radar tracking system. This was designed to gather information to form a database that would become a national resource for counter-pollution measures, port-waste control and other safety and environmental protection activities.

Our engineers were based permanently at the MCA in Dover to support the new system. They were on hand to provide training and help for operators who needed to become familiar with the increased functionality as quickly as possible.

Centre of Excellence

Also in Dover, we have developed a national Centre of Excellence for maintenance and support for the Agency’s communications. All IT elements for which we are responsible pass through this centre as they are scheduled for test or repair.

The MCA can call on us for specialist advice at any time. Its Technical Manager John Morphew explained why this was so valuable when we set up the arrangement. He said: “With our VHF coverage reaching out 30 nautical miles, we could be looking for advice in connection with our hilltop sites around the coast. For example, sites sometimes need re-positioning due to coastal erosion – and Arqiva assists with predictive coverage information.”

“We provide maintenance and management service supp ort for the MCA network around mainland Great Britain and N orthern Ireland. This includes preventive and routine maint enance as well as emergency call-outs.”