Portland House

The Solution

Topping out at a shade over 100 metres tall, Portland House is an original 1960s skyscraper in the Victoria quarter of Westminster. A major landmark right next door to Victoria Underground station, the 29-floor building has provided more than 300,000 sq ft of prime office space for more than half a century and in recent years has been joined by a string of major new commercial developments as part of the rejuvenation of the Victoria area.

The building’s operators have long used two way radio to provide a convenient means of mobile communication for staff, including cleaners, security personnel and maintenance teams. Given the size and height of the building, however, they struggled to get 100% reliable signal coverage from top to bottom, which raised concerns when it came to health and safety and fire evacuation protocols in particular.

After approaching Brentwood to ask for a solution, we supplied Motorola SLR5500 repeater units. Repeaters boost the efficiency of two way radio by separating out transmission and reception signals, boosting the effective coverage distance. The SLR5500 is a cutting edge dual digital and analogue model, which provides a hefty 50W of output power, high levels of energy consumption efficiency and digital error correction to improve audio quality as well as signal range.

Photos © Matt Brown and N Chadwick Licensed Under Creative Commons