Home Office radio was the VHF and UHF radio service provided by the British

government A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a ...

to its prison service, emergency service (

police The police are a constituted body of persons empowered by a state, with the aim to enforce the law, to ensure the safety, health and possessions of citizens, and to prevent crime and civil disorder. Their lawful powers include arrest and t ...

ambulance An ambulance is a medically equipped vehicle which transports patients to treatment facilities, such as hospitals. Typically, out-of-hospital medical care is provided to the patient during the transport. Ambulances are used to respond to medi ...

and

fire brigade A fire department (American English) or fire brigade (Commonwealth English), also known as a fire authority, fire district, fire and rescue, or fire service in some areas, is an organization that provides fire prevention and fire suppression se ...

) and

Home Defence A home, or domicile, is a space used as a permanent or semi-permanent residence for one or many humans, and sometimes various companion animals. It is a fully or semi sheltered space and can have both interior and exterior aspects to it. H ...

agencies from around 1939. The departmental name was the Home Office Directorate of Telecommunications, commonly referred to as DTELS. Prior to this, contact by emergency service personnel with their control rooms was made by telephone. Then in 1922 the

Metropolitan Police The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), formerly and still commonly known as the Metropolitan Police (and informally as the Met Police, the Met, Scotland Yard, or the Yard), is the territorial police force responsible for law enforcement and ...

began to install radio receivers in their vehicles. Due to telegraphy only being one way, take up was slow. By the 1970s most police and fire services had their own dedicated radio setups, and personal radios (referred to as PRs) were beginning to be rolled out to the police in most towns and cities. Home Office radio was furthered towards the end of the Cold War, with having a communications network that was independent of the then

Post Office A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letters and parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post offices may offer additional serv ...

deemed a necessity should Britain come under attack from nuclear weapons. Radio schemes run by DTELS consisted of ten

wireless Wireless communication (or just wireless, when the context allows) is the transfer of information between two or more points without the use of an electrical conductor, optical fiber or other continuous guided medium for the transfer. The most ...

depots throughout England, Scotland and Wales, supplemented further by around sixty outstations. Ten regions were designated along the same regional boundaries as the Home Defence were, and within each region was a wireless telegraph station. The Home Office allocated four-character call signs beginning with M2 to every police and fire service, with respective control rooms starting and ending every transmission with said call sign. An oddity of the system was that call signs were often spoken as letters rather than phonetically: "MP" would be said as "Em-Pee" rather than "Mike Papa". This varied between regions.

Regions

England - Regions 2 to 10 excluding 8, Scotland - Region 1, Wales - Region 8.

Police radio codes

Airwave

In 1991 the Directorate of Telecommunications officially changed its name to DTELS and four years later became a private sector company following a trade sale to National Transcommunications Limited (NTL). By the last quarter of 2006 police forces had migrated radio networks from the UHF frequencies to

TeTRa Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA; formerly known as Trans-European Trunked Radio), a European standard for a trunked radio system, is a professional mobile radio and two-way transceiver specification. TETRA was specifically designed for use by go ...

on the Airwave network, followed by ambulance services in 2007 and fire services in 2010. Airwave now has a nationwide network of more than 3,000 sites and provides secure voice and data communications to over 300 public safety organisations.

References

{{Reflist Home Office (United Kingdom)