Congratulations to the 2026 WA State Professional of the Year – David Deacon
ARCIA is proud to announce David Deacon from Etherstack as the winner of the 2026 Western Australia State Professional of the Year Award.
David Deacon has been working in the communications industry since the early 1990’s, having begun his career initially in MPT1327 and cellular GSM technologies in Western Australia.
Catching the LMR bug early, after working on MPT1327 systems, he moved onto P25 solutions in the late 90’s for Stanilite Electronics, later setting up his own firm in 1995, which he grew and sold to Open Telecommunications (backed by OneTel) in 2000.
For Open Telecommunications, he moved to the Netherlands in the early 2000’s, but not content working for others, it wasn’t long before he began his next enterprise, starting his next business, and the company which he still leads today, in 2002.
After spending time growing this business, setting up R&D centres in the Netherlands, UK, USA, Japan and Sydney, he returned to WA in 2020 and now calls Perth home, once again.
Over the last 20+ years, like many B2B companies, although the firm he built is perhaps not a household name, it’s fair to say that the organisation has delivered home-grown, Australian designed and developed communications solutions to most of the well-known OEMs in the LMR industry today including: Cisco, Codan / Daniels, GME, Icom, JVCKenwood, L3-Harris / MACom, NEC, Simoco and Tait.
As well as commercial LMR protocol stacks, RF transceiver designs, encryption solutions and complete narrowband core networks, the firm has developed and delivered Australian-built narrowband voice & data solutions to defence, including: Raycal, Thales, Lockheed-Martin and European & American Government and Defence organisations.
Fast-forward to 2008, a proud moment, and this Australian firm was floated on the ASX, which commenced a period of growth that continues today. In 2021, this innovative firm was awarded the contract for the first open-standards P25 LMR to LTE Inter-Working Function by AT&T/FirstNet in the US.
And last year, the firm was successful in winning the Mission-Critical Push-To-Talk standards-compliant 3GPP LMR-to-LTE Inter-Working Function project for the UK’s Emergency Services Networks.
Together, these two networks are some of the largest Safety-Critical systems in the World, enabled by a little-known, small Australian company, run by David Deacon.
This is truly not a personal, but an Australian Communications Industry success-story, seeing Australian R&D developed and delivered to the World’s largest Public Safety Narrowband Networks. Creating innovation in LMR and providing Australian careers for Australian Communications and Engineering Specialists.
Congratulations David!
David will automatically be entered into the running for the National Outstanding Professional of the Year Award, competing against other state winners. The national award will be announced at the ARCIA Gala Dinner in Melbourne on October 14, held in conjunction with Comms Connect.
A special thanks to all our partners— ARCIA can’t deliver these events for the radio and critical communications sector without you.
