In the case of famous services such as the RNLI’s 24-hour search & rescue, Mountain Rescue England & Wales, and the scores of other organisations who save lives, this is certainly true.

The RNLI receives an average of 24 callouts each day for its 4,400 crew members to deal with emergencies around the sometimes-treacherous UK and Irish coastline. In Mountain Rescue, there are 49 volunteer teams, 38 in England and 11 in Wales, in eight regional bodies, across eight geographical areas.

These are very large, complex organisations.

When the shoutout comes, volunteers could be at home eating dinner, at work, out shopping or even asleep, giving them just minutes to reach the rescue station.

Totally reliable communications systems that can cope with a myriad of complexities are therefore crucial to ensure the fastest possible response times. Pagers are often a preferred tool; however, if the local area has a weak signal, which is common in remote coastal and mountain areas, it can limit their effectiveness. A system which accesses a fully-monitored network, to maximise situational awareness is therefore the solution.

Step forward Multitone’s Appear Crew App, designed for use by Britain’s emergency services: a communications app with simple message confirmation, which functions as a smartphone pager, or alerter. 

Jason Humphreys is Multitone Electronics’ Emergency Services Account Manager and explained how the ESN-ready critical alerting app can help crews in organisations such as the RNLI and Mountain Rescue:

“Multitone’s Appear Crew App has two key advantages. Firstly, using the system’s iConsole, control rooms can quickly and clearly see the response from crew members to a mobilisation. They are able to see who is responding to the call, which is especially useful for ensuring that teams have the right mix of skills. Furthermore, if a smartphone is offline, controllers can see this too.

“Secondly, Appear Crew gives complete security with end-to-end AES encryption of all transmitted data, offering a reliable alternative to popular and commercial apps. It can complement or even replace a pager system, providing enhanced communications in areas where pagers face the challenge of a weak signal reception.”

The Appear Crew app is extremely flexible, too. It can integrate directly with GD92 networks or operate independently with Multitone i-Message, on-site or in the cloud.

Multitone Electronics has extensive experience in delivering bespoke integration, automation and communications systems, so if you wish to find out more about how your system could work with the app or any of our other solutions, their experts will be happy to discuss it with you.

www.multitone.com