• Codan’s portable Envoy has brought digital architecture to High Frequency (HF) communications, allowing transmission of voice and data from virtually anywhere in the world with no installed infrastructure.
    Codan’s portable Envoy has brought digital architecture to High Frequency (HF) communications, allowing transmission of voice and data from virtually anywhere in the world with no installed infrastructure.
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For Codan’s Paul McCarter, two years leading the company’s Radio Communications division has been nothing if not stimulating. He’s helped revive high frequency communication as a technology for the future, created a digital communications “skunk works” on two continents and thrown the company’s newest product off the roof.

Founded in 1959 and headquartered in Adelaide, Codan is a world recognised maker of radio communications equipment, metal detectors and mining technology. Its business portfolio includes the Minelab and Minetec businesses and its High Frequency (HF) and land mobile radio products have become a byword for reliability and capability in the field. Codan is a recognised supplier of remote area communications to international emergency aid and public safety agencies including the world’s most recognised and trusted global humanitarian agencies.

The company has provided around 3,000 transceivers to support security and rebuilding programs in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its metal detection systems have unearthed lethal land mines in areas of conflict, and Viking treasure in Scotland. Codan exports 85 per cent of its products and recorded total revenues of A$132 million last financial year, with 375 employees across seven nations and manufacturing plants in two.

England-based McCarter joined Codan Radio Communications in 2013, with a mandate to develop the HF and land-based radio markets. His appointment didn’t include a move to Australia; the former British Army Royal Signals captain, who had formerly held positions with Thales, BT Cellnet and Cobham was hired for his experience in developing international business. His brief was to take Codan’s radio products to the world.

“When I came in the skill and the capability of the organisation was mainly based around the superb engineering talent,” McCarter told ADM. “But it was very Australian centric. Even though it was selling in to some third world countries it needed more of a global outlook and, more importantly, a network in to the markets where you could shine a light on the capability of its products.”

In 2013 Codan was at the end of one of its most dynamic growth periods in a decade, driven by sales of mineral detection equipment in to African gold mines through its Minelab arm. But falling gold prices and a plethora of counterfeit products in Africa were beginning to put a dent in future projections.

Codan’s radio engineers already had an antidote – the new Envoy digital HF smart radio, released at the Eurosatory Exhibition in Paris in 2012. Envoy combined the legendary long-range, infrastructure- free benefits of HF, which had long been Codan’s bread and butter, with a fully defined software architecture. This turned the traditional, sometimes patchy audio in to something as clear as a mobile phone call, moving voice and data reliably at ranges of more than 3,000 km. As someone used to operating in remote areas with little or no infrastructure, McCarter got the point. Here was a communications system to rival satellite, but without the up-front investment, coverage issues or ongoing access and call costs.

“You can be sitting in Swaziland in the middle of nowhere with no coverage from anything,” he said. “Switch on the HF radio, press a button and it will link through to the tower that’s on an exchange, it could be hundreds of kilometres away. And because it’s an IP radio it can go all the way through the IP network and ring somebody’s desk phone in Brussels and you’ve got a call from the middle of nowhere on an HF radio. And people didn’t get this, because their perception of what was possible with HF was still based on the old analogue systems.”

McCarter knew the company had the product, but needed people who could open doors to major government agencies and blue chip companies across the globe. A newly beefed up Codan Radio sales and leadership team then set about visiting potential customers around the world, not to sell, but simply to demonstrate that an Envoy and a HF antenna could turn any vehicle, tent or building in to a robust global voice and data communications hub. The result has been strong Envoy sales in to humanitarian and government agencies around the world, including the United States.

“Envoy has allowed us to go in to different markets and customer groups selling communication solutions rather than single radio platforms,” McCarter said. “In the US, effectively we went up against Harris and Datron, who are US national companies with their own HF capability. We were in their backyard and we won.”

To keep the ideas coming, Codan Radio established “skunk works” think tanks at its Canadian and Adelaide design centres. At the International Wireless Communication Expo in Las Vegas in March, Codan announced another new product called ‘Stratus’.  It is designed to bridge the gap between North America’s national P25 emergency services communications network and 3G/4G mobile communications networks. The Stratus is a suitcase-sized device that can create an instant P25-compatible network anywhere, anytime, in minutes. The system’s robust design has been eloquently demonstrated with a series of “Smash a Stratus” YouTube videos showing a Stratus repeater being pushed down a stair case, dropped from a loading dock and even tossed from a two-storey building roof before resuming operation as if nothing had happened.

Paul McCarter is understandably upbeat about Codan’s future. The graphs are heading in the right direction, Stratus seems set to make its mark in the $3 billion per year P25 infrastructure equipment market in the US and Envoy is receiving the kind of customer feedback that paints it as a long term winner. But while everyone loves to promote great products, he believes the company’s realignment wouldn’t have happened without its people and particularly their willingness to change and adapt to keep the company relevant.

“I’m used to working for large corporates which don’t have a lot of soul,” he said. “When I first flew down to Australia the thing that really impressed me was the almost family culture in Codan, which really drives a strong sense of everybody working on the same thing to get to the end goal. But Codan has also now reached out and brought in a world class pool of talent to apply to a business that is now really starting to get going and has got a head of steam for where it’s heading in the marketplace. It’s got a lot of opportunities.”

 

This article first appeared in Australian Defence Magazine VOL.23 No.5, May 2015

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