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Business Review 1996/1997
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Business Review 1996/1997
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Monitoring
The Agency's Radio Monitoring Station at Baldock in Hertfordshire provides a range of monitoring services. The activities of the three sections during 1996-97 are summarised in Table 9.
The Terrestrial Monitoring Station is run from an Operations Room which is staffed on a 24-hour basis with primary responsibility for the protection of the spectrum from harmful interference. During the year 1,489 reports of interference were received from users, including the emergency services, in the United Kingdom and from other administrations throughout the world. In all cases affecting safety of life services, the response was within the target time of 24 hours.
The Operations Room is also responsible for contacting the Agency's field staff out of normal hours and there were 696 such calls in the year. During the year changes were made to the way in which Temporary Earth Station clearance requests are issued and, as a result, only requests received outside normal working hours are now dealt with by the Operations room, the remainder being processed at the Agency's London Headquarters. Nevertheless, 4,077 clearances were processed during the year and the total is expected to continue to rise significantly.
The Satellite Monitoring Station takes measurements and observations on the use of the geostationary arc by communications and broadcast satellites. Information on transponder occupancy and orbital arc occupancy is collected to enable interference problems and conflicts between shared users of this part of the spectrum to be resolved quickly and satisfactorily.
The facility is equipped with two fully steerable large parabolic reflectors for use in the Ku and C frequency bands and a smaller 1.8m antenna for the L band.
The Mobile Monitoring teams based at Baldock systematically monitor usage of the PMR bands on a national basis. Most of the routine monitoring is achieved by unattended monitoring techniques which detail channel loadings for each location.
A monitoring strategy that will cover 36 conurbations has been developed and the resulting channel occupancy information will be available for regional licensing centres to access. The monitoring systems also collect data to facilitate policy decisions.
Mobile Monitoring and a Rapid Deployment system is available for areas needing finer detail or manual interpretation of information. Audits of common base stations throughout the country are also undertaken using a combination of techniques.
Seven of the twenty one unattended systems are completing the audits of all PMR bands in London. These systems are dedicated to London and will repeat the monitoring cycle to provide updates for licensing purposes and to support policy decisions.
While the chart at Table 9 shows a reduction in staff time associated with mobile monitoring compared with previous years, there has in fact been an approximately 11 fold increase in monitoring as a result of the use of unattended systems. This increase in efficiency is likely to continue as more unattended monitoring is adopted.
The two NAMAS accredited EMC and interference laboratories deal with complex measurement and interference work across the radio spectrum. Radio Fixed Access, interference to aeronautical services and special assignments have dominated recent work.
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