Berkshire is a Home County in the South East of England. It is also often referred to as the Royal County of Berkshire because of the presence of the royal residence of Windsor Castle in the county; this usage, which goes back to the 19th century at least, was recognised by the Queen in 1958, and Letters patent issued confirming this in 1974.

Berkshire borders the counties of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Wiltshire, Hampshire and Greater London.

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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.