High-profile Safety and Security

Jacksons Fencing is one of the UK’s leading designers, manufacturers and installers of security fencing and access control systems and a long standing user of Kenwood ProTalk analogue radios at its three locations in Ashford, Bath and Chester, where they are put to work in providing on-site communications between management, health and safety, manufacturing and operations teams.

The company has recently completed the installation of 8.5km of security fencing and more than 40 pedestrian and vehicle gates at the Eurotunnel Terminal, Coquelles, France as part of a high-profile Anglo-French initiative to upgrade safety and security at the terminal’s 41.8km perimeter against illegal migration activity.
The project had to be delivered against an extremely tight deadline of eight weeks from confirmation of the order and by the end of the first week, Jacksons already had a seventy strong team on site having created a secure compound for its plant, materials and site welfare facilities.

As the teams would be working at four key locations spread throughout the perimeter of the terminal, the logistics of supplying each team with materials from the central compound as they arrived from the UK posed a constant challenge to Jacksons Fencing’s Contracts Manager, Steve Hancock, who was based in Coquelles throughout the contract period. Steve commented: “We knew that delivery of the project called for reliable, seamless communications – when you have seventy people working flat-out on different elements of the project at the same time across four locations; the last thing you need is for anyone to be held up waiting for materials or being unclear as to what to do next. Mobile phone reception could not be guaranteed and frankly, they are not rugged enough for this type of us either, so we asked Kenwood if they could help us with a communications solution which we could deploy quickly and importantly, be suitable for site conditions and easy to use”.

Kenwood ProTalk TK-3401D dPMR digital hand portable radios proved to be the ideal solution

Steve continued: “The simple controls of the radio were familiar to the users which along with the extended range and clarity of digital technology and the fact that they werelicense-free made them perfect. All we had to do was to ensure the radios were set to digital operation, the batteries charged overnight at the end of each working day and we were good to go. I couldn’t be more pleased with how they performed and helped in getting this project completed on time!”​