Case study · July 2026
HDMCC Fortified Rally
Three days of WiFi and radio inside a Palmerston-era fort with no mobile signal. First live deployment of the full UKEC event network, and our first event running radios under our Ofcom (Suppliers Light) Licence.
132 GB
Data delivered
50
Peak concurrent clients
3
Isolated networks
0
Outages all weekend
The event
A rally inside a fort.
The Fortified Rally is a three-day motorcycle club camping rally run by the Hull & District Motorcycle Club, held within the enclosed grounds of Paull Point Battery (Fort Paull), East Yorkshire. The battery was built between 1861 and 1864 as part of the Palmerston defences of the major ports. Today its large open parade ground, surrounded by thick brick ramparts, hosts tents, bikes, vendor stalls and a stage and PA area for the weekend.
Thick brickwork and an out-of-the-way location mean mobile signal on site ranges from patchy to none. For a weekend where attendees camp on site, vendors take card payments and organisers need to reach their stewards, that’s a real problem. HDMCC asked us to solve it.
What we deployed
This was the first live deployment of the full UKEC event network. Everything was pre-built and tested off site, then installed and signed off before the gates opened.
- Uplink: Starlink satellite as primary, with 4G failover available.
- Core: a 4U rack running an EdgeRouter Pro 8 gateway and an EdgeSwitch 24 with 500W of PoE.
- Coverage: three outdoor DrayTek VigorAP 918R access points (802.11ac Wave 2) mounted on the stage truss and rampart walls, plus indoor units.
- Networks: three separate VLANs, each on its own subnet. The public HDMCC Free WiFi, plus separate secured vendor and staff SSIDs, with client isolation on the public-facing network.
- Fair use: FQ-CoDel fair queuing across the public network with per-client rate limiting, so no single device could degrade the experience for everyone else.
How it performed
The network ran continuously across the weekend with no outages. The Starlink uplink delivered 132 GB of data WAN-side over the three days, roughly 44 GB per day.
- Peak of 50 concurrent clients, with over 75 unique devices seen across the weekend. Average usage worked out at roughly 1.8 GB per device.
- The busiest access point carried 26 clients, the second busiest 23, spread across both bands.
- Band steering pushed the majority of clients and traffic onto 5GHz. On the busiest AP that meant 8.42 GB over 5GHz against 3.39 GB on 2.4GHz.
- Public WiFi accounted for 54 to 85% of traffic per access point, with the vendor and staff networks carrying the remainder.
Radios under our Ofcom (Suppliers Light) Licence
Fortified was also the first event where we ran our radios under our Ofcom (Suppliers Light) Licence rather than licence-free kit. That gives us access to better frequencies and more transmit power, and the difference was audible from the first radio check.
A team of around ten marshals stayed in contact throughout the event on a fleet of Baofeng handhelds. Crystal clear audio throughout the fort, and a good working range outside the walls for full coverage of the gate.
Additional services
We also provided a digital signage screen for the weekend. It was the first time we had run one, and the organisers could update the assets themselves while the screen looped through them across the event: WiFi details, announcements and sponsor slides. It earned its place, and it is now something we offer properly.
What we took from it
A site with no mobile signal ran card payments, streaming, messaging and organiser comms for three days without interruption. The pre-built rack meant on-site setup was short, the VLAN separation kept vendors and the public cleanly apart, and the fair-queuing setup did its job: nobody noticed anyone else on the network, which is exactly the point.
Fort Paull is the kind of venue that breaks normal connectivity assumptions. If your event site looks anything like it, we’d be happy to talk it through.
More case studies
Other sites, other problems.
A field behind a pub
Cods & Sods September 2026
The pub had WiFi, the camping field had none. A lean kit moved over 120 GB in two days to around 60 guests, fast WiFi to every tent, plus staff radio.
Read the case study
Deep woodland, zero signal
Bailwood April 2026
250 people under tree cover with no mobile signal at all. Radio across the whole site, WiFi kept deliberately small for the bar and vendors. Includes Mini-Bailwood, the same job for twenty people.
Read the case studyPlanning an event somewhere awkward?
No signal, thick walls, remote fields. That’s the work we like. Tell us about the event and we’ll come back with a plain-English plan and quote.
Get in touch All case studies