Feb/Mar 2008

An unusual hybrid truck-mounted computer has been developed by Belgravium for Fleet Support Limited, a shipping services company, to support a change to the cranage system used in the dockyards at Portsmouth.

FSL had a requirement to upgrade the cranes in use in its southern warehousing facilities. The cranes are used to facilitate the supply and replenishment of materials coming in and out of Portsmouth on Navy ships.

As part of the project, FSL wanted to issue crane drivers with cab-mounted terminals running Windows CE.net, but they also had to work on the dockyard's narrow-band RF wireless network.

Normally such units work on spread-spectrum networks such as Wi-Fi, but Belgravium did some bespoke development to harmonise these disparate systems. It based the equipment on its Monaco 7100 truck mounted terminal range. The warehouse management aspect of the project was handled by Invar Systems.

 

FSL Logistics provides an integrated logistics service to commercial and defence customers. It was founded in 1998 to manage the former Portsmouth Royal Dockyard. The Portsmouth warehousing and transport facility includes one of the largest warehousing facilities in the south of England.