Moreland City Council Radio System Upgrade
Silver Comm have been providing radio communications equipment and services to Moreland City Council for many years. Recently, in light of increasing demand for improved communications, the council decided to adopt a suggestion put forward by Silver Comm that, rather than operate the radio base station repeater from a 15 metre tower located on the roof of their maintenance depot, they needed a much higher tower site in order to greatly improve radio coverage throughout the council boundary and to ensure coverage into some of the lower lying areas of the council.

The council placed an order for a new Tait TB8000 repeater to be located at Silver Comm’s prime communications site on a multi-storey building in Glenroy. A telephone interconnect unit was interfaced into the repeater to give council staff the ability to make telephone calls through the radio system. This is primarily an occupational health and safety feature for staff that work after hours to be able to make duress calls in the event of an emergency. It means that the radio system is still operational even when there is no staff at the depot to take their radio calls.

The council also ordered a quantity of telephone handsets, linked to the depot radio, to spread throughout the depot, mounted on the desks and workstations of key staff that most need to communicate with council vehicles on the road. A selective calling system has been programmed into the radios to allow private calls between telephone handsets and mobile radios in the field. An emergency “Duress” button has been programmed into a button on the front panel of each radio that a staff member can press and immediately receive an emergency response.

The maintenance depot fleet of trucks is being progressively upgraded to new vehicle mounted radios. Hand-held portable radios have been supplied to the supervisors so that they can be in contact with the vehicle fleet at all times.

Silver Comm installs new Taxi dispatch system
Silver Top Taxi Service, Victoria’s largest taxi service, recently purchased a state of the art taxi dispatch system for their fleet of almost 2000 cabs in Melbourne and regional centres.  Silver Comm undertook the project of installing the in-vehicle computers into these cabs and deployed their team of approximately 20 expert technicians and installers to complete the task in record time.

The project was made all the more challenging because the old dispatch system needed to be maintained until every cab had been installed with the new equipment. Silver Comm devised a technical solution to allow all of the cabs receiving the new technology to continue to operate under the old dispatch system for the duration of the install period, that is, until every cab was installed and the new dispatch system could be launched.

In early August, 2009 the final Silver top cab was installed with the new in-vehicle computer system followed by the successful launch of the new dispatch system. The installation was a complete success and the proprietors of Silver Top were delighted with the speed and efficiency of the Silver Comm team in performing such a large installation job with very little down time for each cab.