22 Jun 2017

Brentwood upgrades the Queen’s Hospital to Linked Capacity Plus

Brentwood Communications recently upgraded a radio network at the Queen’s Hospital in Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire, from a single site Motorola Capacity Plus system, which covered just the hospital’s main building to a three-site Linked Capacity Plus system that covers all the core areas of the hospital.

The hospital, which is operated by the Burton Hospitals NHS Foundations Trust, uses two way radios for all staff, with the main users being porters and the estates department. The hospital contacted Brentwood (the company that installed the Capacity Plus system) because its staff, especially those who work across the whole site, needed a larger network that would allow them to use their radios on the move across a larger area.

Capacity Plus is a piece of trunking software which increases the number of individual radios able to operate on a system simultaneously without purchasing licenses for extra frequencies, while Linked Capacity Plus uses digital repeater units in different locations to effectively create extended two-way radio networks from smaller individual ones. Brentwood Communications recommended the latter and the Trust’s management agreed to its proposals.

The company then installed Motorola SLR5500 Repeaters in four locations – two in the hospital main building, one in the basement, and one in the treatment centre. Once configured with the Linked Capacity Plus software, these four repeaters were joined together to create one large network spanning the core areas of the hospital.