Dunwich Heath Wildfire

The Dunwich Heath Wildfire started on 29th July 2026 and affects around 120 hectares of Dunwich Heath and the RSPB Minsmere reserve on the East Coast between Sizewell and Southwold, south of Gt Lowestoft.

East Sussex RAYNET were working at Dunwich at the request of Suffolk County Council to build, install and operate a site-wide secure radio network to address limited coverage of normal cellular, Airwave and hand-held radios in the incident area, and to enable communications between agencies with no compatible radio equipment.

As of midday on Saturday 8th August, East Suffolk RAYNET (ESR) continues to provide wide-area voice communications for Suffolk Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) at the Dunwich
Heath & Minsmere fire. We are providing PMR service using UHF DMR under a Supplier Light license comprising a Motorola DR3000 repeater and 43 TYT or Retevis handsets with encryption.

All 32 East Suffolk DMR hand-held radios are deployed as are 11 sourced on loan from ESR and Essex members. A second Hytera UHF repeater and trailer mast are on site in case the fire situation requires relocation of the operational control site without a break in radio cover. A VHF DMR repeater is on site but has not yet been deployed.

We were first called at 13:17 on Sunday 2nd August by Suffolk County Council after a major incident had been declared and a TCG set up. We were asked to deploy at 15:00 with first operators on site at 16:00 to meet SFRS officers and determine requirements. It was established that the main requirement was to have site-wide voice communication between fire crews and their operational control site over a 3 x 3 km incident area that is far from level ground with steep escarpments and deep gullies.

Neither Airwave nor the SFRS fireground radios covered the whole site and no cellular network had good coverage at operational control when we arrived. We had the repeater on site at 17:00 on the 2nd and it was operational with the first 16 handsets in use by 18:30. Management of handset issue, returns and recharging has been delegated to SFRS. SFRS expect to require our services as long as a control vehicle and multiple teams are deployed to site which will be well into the week commencing 10th August.

We are running two nets on separate DMR time slots:
Slot one for SFRS control, front line crews, 4×4 response, and water tankers
Slot two to allow interoperability between Suffolk Police and Suffolk Highways at road closures on the perimeter of the fire zone.

The repeater is running on batteries maintained by solar power, and we have not gone below 40% after the first full day, and have been fully charged by noon every day, so should be able to sustain operations for the foreseeable future. We are grateful to Essex RAYNET for the loan of their solar chargers and panels, which have eliminated repeater service breaks during battery changes and enabled us to continue charging handsets when the fire service main generator was offline. We are not allowed to use an internal combustion generator in our unpaved location due to severe and real fire risk with dry chopped vegetation underfoot, so solar or offsite charging were our only options.

We have maintained a presence of at least one and up to 4 operators on site collocated with SFRS, Suffolk Police, East Anglian Ambulance and other voluntary supporting services including RRT and the Salvation Army. We have had a continuous presence on site since 4pm on Sunday 2nd August to monitor and support the repeater, to program and check handsets and to provide communications advice. Chris G0CPC and I have attended most of the voluntary sector 10am coordination calls and the senior RAYNET operator on site attends twice or three times daily JESIP meetings of the various groups and services on site.

While we have not passed incident traffic on amateur bands, we have maintained a watch on 2M when required for operator talk-in and as a safety net for Norfolk and Suffolk 4×4 and Suffolk Lowland Search and Rescue operators who are licensed and working closer to the fire.

Going forward we expect to continue in this way until Monday afternoon when we have agreed with SFRS to continue the repeater service as an unattended operation with operators on a 2 hour call out to resolve any issues.

National fire crews from other counties will be leaving Friday 7th August, and I expect to be able to recover and return privately owned handsets on loan to the group. The loaned mast and solar chargers will need to be returned to their owners on Thursday to allow their use next weekend so we have agreed to revert to our initial tactical solution with daily battery change visits for as long as it takes.

We are grateful to:

• Dave G8XOR for the loan of his 15m mast, high-capacity batteries and box trailer.
• Essex RAYNET, Forest Heath RAYNET and Norfolk RAYNET for additional operator support.
• Essex RAYNET and many individual members for loans of various items.
• Norfolk and Suffolk 4×4 for allowing use of their Starlink service for our coordination and reporting and to host us when attending daily video calls with the council and other agencies off-site.