As Mercury Personal Communications Ltd re-affirms its commitment to its Personal Communication Network, Vodafone Group Plc has been placing base station orders with Southampton-based Racal An-tennas Ltd for its Micro-Cellular Network, MCN, service. Racal says the Vodafone order, covering Phase 1 of MCN installation, is for several hundred structures, comprising twin omni-directional antennae and specially-designed high-stability towers. The antennae, from Racal’s RA1613 series, were designed for high lightning risk areas: apparently, they have been tested to levels equivalent to a 100,000,000 Volt lightning discharge. Racal announced this order just as Vodafone said that installation of its Groupe Speciale Mobile base stations, which are to be used for the MCN service, are running at around 10 per week. Coverage, in the form of around 140 base stations, is said now to extend throughout Greater London, the South East, west along the M4 as far as Newbury, and many areas in the Home Counties. By spring 1993, the intention is to cover about 90% of the UK population. Racal Antennas also has announced orders for its base-station antennae from the two Hong Kong CT2 networks. These are to be operated by Chevalier (Telepoint) Ltd and Hutchison Paging Ltd. Together, the two Hong Kong orders represent around 3,000 antennae, and include omni-directional, directional and low-profile antennae. The last category is to be used to support the networks’ mass transit railway-base station sites. In addition, Racal Antennas has added to its range of antennae for ETACS/GEM, PCN and Micro Cellular Networks. The RA1655 range is a family of PCN antennae, operating in the 1.71GHz-to-1.82GHz frequency band. Panel mounted, they range in length from 9.8 to 53, with gains from 10dBi to 18dBi, and have a power rating of 200W continuous. The RA1650 series, pitched at ETACs/GSM networks, are directional panel antennae, which operate at 500 Watts in the 872MHz-to-960MHz band, with lengths from 19.7 to 106, and with gains from 10dBi to 18dBi.
