Background
The airport at Bale Mulhouse is an international airport in the Alsace region of France. Bordering three countries, France, Switzerland and Germany, it is a busy international airport with low-cost airlines as well as long distance, intercontinental flights.
Passengers from all over the world pass through the airport with record numbers of 9 million people in 2019.
The Challenge
A multi storey car park, catering for 2800 cars, was built to provide parking for the transient visitors. However, the steel structure of the building with concrete floors and metal, mesh surrounding walls made the building operate like a faraday cage, blocking the signal from the mobile operators from entering the car park. Visitors and staff in the car park could not use their mobile phones. This provided a real problem for the health and safety for the visitors, as car parks can be isolated places if help is needed. It was also a nuisance for the visitors as they couldn’t access data to check flights, or make calls to arrange to collect people. Lastly, the eParking machines all relied on a cellular signal, and wouldn’t work in the car park and the security guard’s office had no signal at all. It was a communication black spot.
Management in the airport reached out to a local company – Topsat – a certified Stella Doradus Integrator who has a wide range of expertise in solving mobile signal problems.
The Solution
The management required a solution that would provide voice and data for all the visitors to the car park. It also had to ensure that the eParking machines would work and that the system could cover all areas over the 6 levels 59000 M². Since the Stella Repeaters ticked all of these boxes, Topsat chose the Stella Titan System.
This multi-storey car park was a challenge because of the length of the building – 290Mt long and 6 stories high. Topsat studied the files carefully to ensure that the placement of the antennas would cover all areas. It was decided that 4x separate repeater installations with 4 external yagis would be installed to ensure cable lengths would not exceed the maximum advised lengths. Line Amplifiers allowed cables of 150Mt to be installed between the external antenna and the internal antennas. A mixture of ceiling mount omnis and wall mount panal antennas were installed to provide coverage in the different types of locations.
The equipment used:
- 1 External Panel antenna
- 4 External Yagi antennas
- 5 iRepeaters iR6
- 25 Line Amplifiers 800 / 900 / 2100 MHz
- 5 Internal Panel Antennas
- 85 internal antennas ceiling mount, omni directional
- 29 electrical boxes
- 4200 m cable SD 400
Installation time: 3 weeks with 2 people
The result
Full mobile signal is now available in all areas of the parking and guard’s offices, enabling full voice signal and super-fast data for all staff and visitors, as well as signal for GSM devices such as VISA pay terminals and eParking machines.
Management were very pleased to see that their communication problems were solved so quickly and efficiently.