Holme Valley Mountain Rescue Team
The Holme Valley Mountain Rescue Team (HVMRT) based in Marsden, West Yorkshire are an immediate response rescue team of trained volunteers who offer their services for free and are available to all. Covering the southern half of West Yorkshire much of the work they do involves assisting and supporting the emergency services such as the police in rescue incidents.
HVMRT first approached Probado at the end of 2018 to look into problems they had been experiencing in trying to set-up their own VPN (Virtual Private Network) and so needed to call in expert help.
After an online search of IT companies HVMRT found Probado whilst searching for local companies based around West Yorkshire.
Tom Dawes of HVMRT comments ‘as luck would have it ‘Probado’s Director Martin Jones lived close by from our headquarters and was aware of us as an emergency service.’
Confidence in Probado
‘What impressed them most was Probado’s willingness to help us as a charity. They knew exactly what was being asked of them, what was needed and put forward suggested solutions that really worked.’
For HVMRT communications is key, as originally the organisation had stand alone repeaters in locations where standard broadband was either poor or not available at all. HVMRT had already invested in 4G SIMS believing this would be the solution. However, without static IP’s, the VPNs they had setup would regularly drop and need to be reconfigured. Probado recommended the use of 4G enabled routers at the remote sites.
“We now have better interconnectivity of IT systems linking with other mountain rescue teams through things like mapping software and radio which is growing year on year.”
The solution used the fact that the HQ had a static IP and involved creating dynamic VPNs from the remote locations, including the control van when this comes online, back to the HQ. By doing this each of the remote locations could then route via HQ to any of the other locations and so the VPN Probado provided linked all HMVRT’s repeater sites together. HVMRT now have radio coverage spanning all the way from Leeds to Holmfirth.
Improving Technology
In the last few years mountain rescue and IT technology have taken massive leaps and bounds as teams are very reliant on having robust internet connections and VPN which will only prove to be more important in the future.
Tom Dawes continues ‘We now have better interconnectivity of IT systems linking with other mountain rescue teams through things like mapping software and radio which is growing year on year.’
‘After the work was completed Martin has been more than willing to help support us, answering directly to any questions we have and now everything is set up we can email him remotely.’
