The County of Avon was a non-metropolitan county and ceremonial county in the west of England, named after the River Avon which ran through it. In 1996 the county was abolished and the area split between Bath and North East Somerset, Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire unitary local authorities. The Avon area is still used for some purposes and today has a population of approximately one million people.

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UK WIDE EMERGENCY SERVICES

• All wide area and local Police communications are carried out on the UK wide TETRA network called Airwave using a mixture of Motorola, Sepura and EADS radio terminals. This system replaced their previous 150Mhz AM simulcast wide area and local PR UHF systems. Some historic information can be found here: www.dtels.org/html/site_map.htm

• Local authority NHS Ambulance services use Airwave, replacing their previous wide area 166Mhz and UHF handheld 'incident' radio systems.

• Local authority Fire & Rescue services also use Airwave as their prime method of wide area 'vehicle to control' communications replacing a mixture of FM and AM simulcast systems in the 70Mhz band. At incident Fireground communications are still carried out on simplex UHF frequencies with some cross-band capabilities to Airwave.

Fire & Rescue Services are in the process of migrating to Airwave, some are still operational on 70Mhz.