A BURY company came to the rescue of a major London treasury when it found itself with an unusual communication problem.

Staff at the HBOS treasury were left in a security dilemma because they could hear the chit-chat of crane drivers on their radios.

It posed the question of whether the crane drivers working in the capital could listen to the conversations of people protecting the bank's reserves.

So, HBOS called in Pennine Telecom, of Salford Street, Bury, to solve the problem.

HBOS wanted the signal confined to its nine-storey building, and Pennine got around this difficulty by installing two radio antennas, one pointing up, the other pointing down.

Pennine salesman Shaun Cummins said: "We put in back-to-back UHF paging umbrella antennas which are very directional, giving a closely defined area of coverage. As a result we are able to cover 95 per cent of the building.

"In these situations we normally install an umbrella antenna in the basement pointing up, but in this instance it was not efficient enough.

Mark Winterburn, the group security co-ordinator at HBOS said: "We obviously don't want people listening to us and with our old system we were very close to the frequencies used by crane operatives elsewhere in the city and we could pick up their conversations.

"The previous system was hired and the annual rental was 50 per cent of the cost of installing our own system by Pennine. So, not only have we got more secure communications, it will pay for itself in two years."