New Command & Control Centre featuring Icom IC-A110 Ground to Air Transceiver for Lasham Gliding Centre.
Lasham Gliding Centre, the largest gliding centre in Europe now play host to a new purpose built mobile command & control centre to help coordinate the busy traffic around the airfield. To assist the management team, the new vehicle is fitted with an IC-A110E transceiver with both 8.33 kHz and 25 kHz channel spacing frequencies. With this dual compatibility there is an increase in the number of channels available to the centre.
Werner Stroud, General Manager of Lasham Gliding Centre said, ‘We have previously used veteran double decker buses as control vehicles. The buses seemed to have a lifespan of 3-5 years and cost several thousand pounds to run a year. We decided to look for something which was a bit more mobile and cost efficient and would last a lot longer’.
So what will the new command and control centre offer you? Werner said, ‘Essentially it is equipped to run the airfield operations. Additionally, we hope that in the winter it will give some more protection for our team doing the lights, the launching and the logs. It’s even got a control tower and more briefing space. It also has a nicer environment inside and you can actually do a small lecture for students in there’.
Werner added, ‘The vehicle is roadworthy and you can take it on the public roads. So just in case we wanted to run a distributed operation elsewhere, we could do so as our winches are also roadworthy’.
So what equipment do you have on the vehicle? ‘We have a weather station, launching lights, LED lights for signalling, orange light to signify that a launch is in progress and the Icom
IC-A110 mobile aviation transceiver (programmed with 8.33 kHz )’.
He added, ‘We use radio for launching the airplanes and the tugs. We also provide airfield information for visiting aircraft such as what runways are in use, circuit traffic etc. It is also used for monitoring frequency if anyone wants to know what’s going on and they can ask the airfield what the status of the airfield is’.
So why choose Icom? Werner said, ‘Quite simply, we use Icom because it is the best in the market!’
For more information on the Lasham Gliding Society, visit
http://www.lashamgliding.com.
09/09/2013
