Radio for events: In the summertime

Radio was very different when we first started with hire. We were doing a lot of industrial shutdowns for factories and power stations. The events side grew in the 1990s as radios became more affordable. Event comms started because people saw that two-way radio does one thing very, very well: instant communications.

I guess it was fuelled by mobile phones, because suddenly people realised that they could talk to each other with a mobile phone. But, of course, a mobile phone falls short of the requirements of event communications. I ring you to ask where you’ve put whichever widget I’m looking for on the site, and you say, “I don’t know, ring Fred.” So, I’ve made seven phone calls before I find the widget. But with a radio group call, everybody gets it.

A lot of the events we cover are either in the middle of a very large city, which gives you the capacity, or in a green field in the middle of nowhere, where the networks don’t tend to put high capacity in, even if they have coverage at all, because sheep don’t use mobile phones.