One of the world’s leading producers of iron ore, Fortescue Metals Group, has selected TETRA radio for its Pilbara mines in Western Australia. It will be the largest single TETRA network in Australia’s mining industry.

The system includes Damm infrastructure and Sepura hand-held and mobile terminals, supplied through the regional two-way radio provider Radlink Communications.

Since its foundation in 2003, Fortescue has rapidly become a major iron ore producer and trader. Construction of the company’s mine, rail and port facilities began in February 2006 and by late 2008 operations were underway at its Cloudbreak mine, with more than 15 million tonnes of Fortescue iron ore already exported to China. Mining and processing at Cloudbreak have since increased to more than 100?000 tonnes of ore each day.

At Christmas Creek

Fortescue has subsequently established a second mine at Christmas Creek, 50 kilometres to the east, extending its 256 km railway network to Christmas Creek and a second ore processing facility constructed there.

The Christmas Creek TETRA infrastucture consists of multi-node redundant dual carrier TetraFlex base stations from Damm, all linked via corporate and wireless IP, providing seamless roaming and extensive radio coverage of the mine. The network will be managed by the TetraFlex IP-based dispatcher, with call record database management, statistics, voice recording log servers and network management systems.

Once complete, the system will enable Fortescue radio users to travel across all mine, rail and port sites with seamless voice and data communications at all points of their network.

Sepura has so far delivered more than 800 mobiles and 500 handportable radios to Fortescue for use at its Christmas Creek and Solomon mines and the port.

Doug Bowden, of Sepura, commented: “With the substantial and progressive growth of the mining and petrochemical industries in Australia right now, we believe this project will pave the way for many more similar opportunities for TETRA and Sepura in Australia and the rest of the world.”