Technology

As an open-standard digital radio technology, DMR is immensely popular in the commercial sector, but how does it fare in the mission-critical world, asks Sam Fenwick

Digital mobile radio (DMR) first came onto the scene in 2005 and its Tier III trunked version was launched in 2012. The digital standard developed by ETSI, has become very popular and widely used, with a focus on business-critical usage. "We see DMR as the first choice when it comes to replacing analogue or early digital systems in the Industrial, utility and transportation morket," says chairman of the DMR Association, Leonardo's Mario Micheli. "We have no interest in directly competing in the public safety market, with P25 in the US or with TETRA for large national public safety communications systems."

A member of the Croatian Mountain Rescue Service using a DMR handset supported by

DIVE CRONECT OMR Tier ill network

That said, some organisations are using DMR in a mission-critical context. "There are public safety users in the US that consider DMR as a valid and cost-efficient option [providing all the features they require, but in this case, they do not have interoperability with P25, other than going (over) to an additional analogue channel," says Michell. "Here in Italy, the municipality police forces use DMR because they are not in a position to buy a TETRA system or because they don't have access to 25kHz channels in the UHF band. In addition), firefighters are happy with the basic feature set of DMR

"We are seeing an increase in interest in DMR particularly for tactical or incident teams, things like search and rescue or fireground incident response teams, where they want to have good instantaneous communications but they don't necessarily want to be putting their local team communications across the TETRA network for them," says Sean Fitzgerald, solutions marketing manager at Motorola Solutions. "It's nice and easy to deploy, very mobile."