Wholesale Mine Supply, exclusive US distributor for VARIS technology for underground mining and authorised Kenwood dealer, is answering the call of the industry, literally, with its leaky feeder systems, Smart Com Ethernet and Smart Tag systems.

Company president Bill Hensler calls VARIS the “leading supplier of underground communications for the coal mining industry in the United States”, with 46 current installations at underground operations.

While the company also works in rock mines, underground government facilities and tunnels, Hensler said its work with VARIS in the underground coal sector is like no other and that the products they offer are unique, “giving us something that no one has before”

“In the olden days, a cable could be cut, maybe, five miles into the mine – if you wanted to know where it was cut, you would have to go and manually search five miles of cable. It would take days,” he said, as he discussed the company’s leaky feeder system, with which he has worked heavily with VARIS engineering manager Anita Masuskapoe.

“Now you can go to your computer every morning and look at your radius from underground and see exactly what’s going on everywhere with every amplifier and every voltage level,” he said, adding that the set-up is basically a full-scale computer network for operations.

The leaky feeder can also be used as an Ethernet cable, allowing for the advantage of comprehensive communication and monitoring and ability to have a “highway” of information.

“That’s real important now for safety and productivity, [to] know what these multi-million dollar machines are doing; and it’s important to get that information outside [to the surface],” Hensler said.

To bring a full understanding, he explained it this way: “We are taking a cable network head in [CNTS, or cable modem termination system], cable modems and basically using this hardware [and] providing Ethernet network access underground over the leaky feeder network.”

Both Hensler and Masuskapoe said that because the technology is designed especially for underground use, the issues in implementation and development have been non-existent.

Another of the company’s R&D developments now taking centre stage is its Smart Tag location and resource tracking software, which can also be interfaced with the information highway of a mine. According to Hensler, each tag is equipped with four antennas to check multiple directions with an approximate 100-foot range, especially important at crossroads and in areas where multiple workers and machines are located.

“The key advantages of Smart Com is that it runs over existing infrastructure, as opposed to having to install the fibre all the way underground to get a network connection,” Masuskapoe said, adding that Smart Com and Smart tag are not mutually exclusive and that their specifications for installation depends on the operation and its current infrastructure.

With the capacity for gas monitoring, cameras, or any other Ethernet-compatible device in addition to communication, the developments VARIS and Wholesale Mine Supply have collaborated on to bring to the industry are ones which the companies said have not been previously available and which they hope will bring mine communications to the next level.