The Eden Music Festival Sept 3rd to 6th 2009
Dumfries and Galloway RAYNET were contacted by the organisers of the Eden Festival a couple of weeks before the event was due to be staged. The event was being held in the Forest of Ae where there was no mobile phone coverage and the Police communications were marginal, the nearest public telephone was about three miles away in the village of Ae.
The Police and the Health and Safety people decided that unless the promoters could find a way of getting access to the 999 service from the site they would not be granted a licence to run the event.
He asked me if Dumfries and Galloway RAYNET could help. I contacted our Controller John MM0GOF and Deputy Controller Davy MM0KBT to see if we would be interested. After a quick discussion we decided to take on the task.
Our plan was to set up a control on the actual festival site, which would monitor a designated channel on the PBR System operated by the event organisers. We would also have a relay point on higher ground which would have full cell phone coverage and would monitor a 2Mtr link frequency from the site control. If an emergency arose the event safety people would switch to our PBR channel at control and ask us to contact whichever Blue Light service they required, and we would then relay the request via our 2Mtr link to our relay unit on the high ground who would make the appropriate call.
 http://www.mm1bho.co.uk/pictures/Eden-Festival This cover was required 24Hrs per day over the weekend of the Festival. Our site control unit was my own caravan and the relay unit was our mobile control trailer. We managed to get enough bodies to cover the event over the required period apart from a couple of late shifts over the weekend so we decided to bring our hospital talk-through unit into the equation. This unit is sited at the Dumfries Royal Infirmary in the lift house on top of the main building it was put there after the Lockerbie Disaster as an additional asset for future use. This talk-through gives us extensive coverage over Dumfries and Galloway.
This unit would be brought in to action when the relay station was un-manned. The Hospital repeater was activated and left live over the period of the event, the relay station would be put into talk-through mode when the trailer was unmanned and a designated RAYNET operator would monitor the Hospital talk-through for any emergency traffic.
The linking was as follows: - Event Control to Event Relay was on 145.225Mhz, Event Relay Talk-Through to The Hospital Talk-Through was on 433.7875Mhz, and the output frequency from the Hospital Talk- Through was on 144.775Mhz.
This was all fine until a couple of days before we were due on site when I received a phone call from the promoter saying they could not talk from the Production Office to the Box Office at the main gate, the main gate being about two miles from the main site with a massive hill and woodland in between. The PBR radios would not cover that area and again he asked if we could assist.
 http://www.mm1bho.co.uk/pictures/Eden-Festival
After checking the map I found that the relay unit was about a mile away from the main gate on the higher ground, so I suggested that we give our relay unit one of the PBR radios which would enable the box office and security to pass messages back to Production via our operator on the hill, this system worked extremely well.
Over the weekend there were only two treble nine calls, neither of which was of a serious nature. We also had to contact the Police on two occasions, again for non-urgent incidents. The police Airwave system did not work on the site, so they were unable to contact Police HQ in Dumfries but were able to use us to pass a couple of non-urgent messages from Dumfries Police HQ to their officers on the ground via the mobile phone in our hilltop link. I think I can say that the exercise went well and was a huge learning curve for our group, plus we managed to join in the fun at the event! For more pictures click on either of the two pictures above and you will be re-directed to the picture gallery.
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