Devon is a large county in South West England, bordered by Cornwall to the west, and Dorset and Somerset to the east. It is unique among English counties, in that it has two separated coastlines, on the English Channel and Bristol Channel branches of the Atlantic.

Devon is the third largest of the English counties, with a population of 1,109,900. The county town is the cathedral city of Exeter, and the county contains two independent unitary authorities, the port city of Plymouth and the Torbay conurbation of seaside resorts, in addition to Devon County Council itself. Much of the county is rural or National Park land (365 square miles or so, or about 945 km�, are occupied by Dartmoor), and it has consequently, by British standards, a relatively low population density.

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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.