It was, he said, a pleasant surprise. But at a time when years of hard work in North America is increasingly paying off for the Australian technology company, such occurrences are not entirely unexpected.
The brainchild of Sydney mining engineer Gary Zamel, PED is a radio-signal-based paging and emergency warning system developed in the late 1980s. MST didn’t export its first PED system until 1995. Now exports represent about 20% of its annual turnover, which jumped by 40% last year.
According to Kent, MST’s business development and marketing manager, the company is budgeting for a further 15-20% lift in 2001-2002 turnover. The growth is being fuelled by strong sales in overseas markets, including the US, Canada and China, and the domestic market. In May, MST clinched a deal with New South Wales Government-owned Powercoal to supply BeltPEDs for all mine workers at its six underground mines. The order for 1200 units is the biggest ever for PEDs, eclipsing previous purchases by mines in north-west Queensland.
Kent said duty of care legislation in NSW and Queensland had been a catalyst for increased PED sales in the coal industry and he predicted further strong activity in the sector. “The legislation is focusing more attention on the need to be able to contact all personnel whenever they are in a mine,” he said. “Other mine owners are very interested in PED.”
Coal miners are also leading the acceptance of MST products in the US and Chinese markets, while sales are picking up in Canada’s base metals mines. The latest US orders came from one of three MST agents in the country. The company plans to establish its own office in an eastern state of the US next year to further support its distributor and products in the region. Kent said the road to success in overseas markets had been a long and arduous one. However, if current indicators are a guide, the PED invasion of international mine communication markets could be about to explode.
“We have had the reference points at mines (in North America) for some time, and we’re now seeing acceptance of the products grow quickly as a result,” Kent said. “The latest installations in the US bring us to 28 mines that are using PED in North America.
“It’s nice to see some Aussie technology going the other way.
“In Canada we have just installed a PED and BlastPED system at the David Bell gold mine in Ontario, and we have BlastPED demonstrations scheduled for the end of July in the Sudbury Basin. The David Bell installation is interesting — it’s the first PED system with a surface antenna to be installed in Canada for about seven years.
“The 1.6km surface antenna provides signal coverage to the deepest part of the mine (1000m deep). In China we have recently received an order for another five PED systems after the success of our first three installations at Datong Coal.”
Previously a competitor to suppliers of leaky feeder mine communications systems, MST is also now building a substantial leaky feeder-based business leg. According to Kent, while radio-signal communications remains the core focus for the company, leaky feeder contributes nearly 40% of its sales.
“Our VDV leaky feeder system has been winning most of the new installations going to tender, as well as replacing a few other systems,” he said. “To be truthful, we have been getting this success not so much because our leaky feeder technology is that much better than competitive systems, it’s just that we install it and maintain it well for the mines so they get optimum benefits from it.
“We’re also adding extra functionality to our leaky feeder systems, such as telemetry control of pumps and fans, blasting and tagging.”
At the Kundana gold mine, near Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, a newly commissioned MST leaky feeder system was recently used to switch off and re-active fans after the site’s first remote-controlled blast using MST’s BlastPED technology.
“Telemetry is talked about a lot, but to actually implement it successfully is technically demanding,” Kent said. “The range of fans, control circuits, monitoring software, and so on, means each mine requires a custom package designed specifically for its requirements. The infrastructure and skills required to do that take time to establish within a company and we are fortunate that after establishing our Kalgoorlie office (in 1997) we have been able to build up an excellent team of technicians.
“For a long time mines weren’t prepared to pay for this expertise, but after disappointing results with alternatives they are starting to see the benefits of having trained radio technicians on hand, not just an electrician who knows how to plug a line amp in.”
More than half of MST’s 33 employees are service technicians, underlining the strong product support focus within the company. Two-thirds of the service personnel are based at MST’s Kalgoorlie branch office.
The company’s expansion in the underground metalliferous-mine communications market has seen it supply many of Australia’s major mines with its technology. Kent said MST remained the only company supplying radio-based remote blasting technology — BlastPED — which was becoming increasingly well accepted. A new version for openpit mines, known as BlastPED EXEL, represents MST’s first foray into surface mining. Developed to provide a safe and efficient alternative to fuse, BlastPED EXEL is being marketed by the world’s biggest mine explosives company, Orica Explosives, which is understood to have a raft of orders already in its keeping. MST will provide technical support.
“Another new technology that we are just finalising now is an improved tagging system,” Kent said. “Our existing TRACKER tagging system is used for blast time safety, and logging people into and out of a mine. It requires a passive tag to be presented to a reader for scanning.
“The new system, TRACKER II, uses active tags that communicate directly to beacons placed at strategic points within a mine: decline entries, level entries, loading points, etc.”
Kent said there had been as much interest in TRACKER II from coal mines as from underground metal mines (see related story). A trial at the Dartbrook mine, in the Hunter Valley, was the precursor to full-scale commercial production of the new tagging system, likely to occur in early 2002.
“Apart from the safety implications of knowing where people are, within zones underground, the main interest from mines has been in the use of the technology to better manage their vehicle fleet. The system lets them know exactly where each vehicle is.”
