The two-day conference will feature case studies, workshops, panel sessions and technical presentations.

The first live Comms Connect event in 18 months, Comms Connect New Zealand 2021, will be held on 12–13 May at the Lower Hutt Events Centre in Wellington, and will feature the largest-ever line-up of home-grown presenters, with more case study and end-user content than ever before.

Comms Connect New Zealand 2021 will once again present the very best and latest developments in radio and wireless communications — from narrowband radio to PoC, from professional LTE to satellite communications — directly to those responsible for their organisation’s communications and to those who use these technologies in their everyday working lives.

The two-day conference will be broken into two parallel streams and will feature case studies, workshops, panel sessions and technical presentations.

Day 1 will kick off with an update on spectrum management, to be presented by Radio Spectrum Management’s (RSM) Len Starling. That’ll be followed by a look at a multi-site simulcast DMR network trial, to be presented by the Orion Network’s Neville Digby and Andrew Mackintosh.

Other Day 1 morning sessions will include presentations on the impact of Industry 4.0 and 5G on mission-critical communications networks, and using microwave and mmWave wireless backhaul.

After lunch, a workshop will be held to discuss aspects related to encouraging more people to become approved radio engineers and certifiers. The workshop will be led by Len Starling and his RSM colleague, Fadia Mudafar.

Parallel with the workshop, three presentations will cover protecting VHF repeater sites from lighting; LTE standards, requirements and deployments for critical infrastructure; and identity management for public safety and first responder networks.

Day 1’s sessions will conclude with a case study on deploying a DMR network for an electricity utility, and a presentation on how New Zealanders will stay connected in the broadband future.

Once the first day’s business is done, the fun will begin with the Radio Frequency Users Association of New Zealand’s annual Gala Dinner and Awards night, to be held at Te Papa in Wellington.

Day 2 will open with a presentation by Drew Delaney (Public Safety Network) on maximising interoperability with open standards and open APIs.

This will be followed by two streams of presentations, covering everything from tracing interference into land mobile VHF repeaters, to asset tracking and other applications of IoT in the logistics industry, TVNZ’s role in delivery emergency communications, and securing industrial environments.

There’ll also be a presentation by Jeff Bratcher, CTO of the US First Responder Network Authority, on how mission-critical PTT is being deployed for first responders.

Day 2 will conclude with a wide-ranging panel discussion on what can be achieved in the mission-critical communications field with the funding that is and will be realistically available. This will include public safety narrowband and broadband, NextGen 111, big data and data sharing, AI and VR, and interoperability versus integration.

As you can see, this is already a jam-packed program of not-to-be-missed presentations on a huge variety of topics, and there are still some final speaker slots to be confirmed.

So if you’re a professional communications user, a dealer, manufacturer or supplier, you can’t afford to miss out on Comms Connect New Zealand 2021. Full registration details can be found on the event website, with Early Bird discounts available for a limited time.