Two way radio: more than just voice

Two-way radio’s data bandwidth may be small, necessitating a precise and lean approach, but there is a huge amount that can be done with it, as Sam Fenwick discovers

In some respects, two-way radio is its own worst enemy. I say this as it’s all too easy to be seduced by the intuitive, instant and gratifying magic that is one-to-many push-to-talk, to the point where you look no further. As Richard Iveson, business development manager at GlobalView Systems (GVS), says, many users see two-way radio as essentially the same as the walkie-talkies “they used to have when they were kids”, without realising all the other things that modern radios can do.

Kevin Golding, applications manager at South Midlands Communications (SMC), shares this view. “Most people have preconceived ideas about what their radio is used for. We need to break those down because there’s a lot we can do nowadays and there’s very few things we can’t integrate [two-way radios with]; we’ve done everything from super-yachts to fire alarms in hotels to airports… all of those things are possible”.

He adds that the use of data applications over two-way radio benefits from its very high reliability and availability [if implemented correctly] and that users should use broadband networks when available and appropriate – but “if you’ve got mission-critical or commercially critical data that needs to be moved, don’t rely on any [single network].