Remote Site Monitoring

Application Note

www.tascsystems.com

Field Supervisor: “We didn’t know when communication was down and which site was causing the problem until we keyed the radio”.

A prominent Hydro Electric provider in North America looked to TASC Systems as the solutions provider to continually monitor the health of their radio network. Tower sites scattered across their territory and varied landscape posed many problems for the personnel and resources assigned to maintain the system.

Site visits to remote locations are expensive and time consuming especially during periods of extreme weather conditions. As a result, it became increasingly important to be able to monitor the health of their system and when failure occured, arm the field personnel with the correct replacement parts.

The Hydro electric company relies on the radio system as its communication backbone for their staff in the field maintaining the hydro facilities. If the radio communication network goes down it could affect the level of service that is provided to the people who rely on hydro being available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Their remote sites consist of a few different configurations, however the backhaul for the information connecting all the sites is a 4-wire leased line. The devices that need to be monitored are the

repeaters, generators, UPS, batteries, antennas, and fuel tanks. The outputs monitored on each of these devices included RSSI, generator “on or off”, battery low, main power, fuel level low, HVAC fail, and VSWR. Essentially most of the equipment can be monitored by the siteCOMMANDER system providing alarms for each change in state that has been programmed based on their system requirements.

siteVIEW Enterprise (sVE) is the graphic user interface (GUI) used to represent the network of remote sites being monitored. When a change in state occurs, an alarm is generated within the GUI indicating the problem area. The hydro command center would receive this information enabling them to investigate the problem remotely. Armed with detailed information they can determine a timely, cost effective course of action.

The siteCOMMANDER system by TASC has enabled the hydro provider to take a proactive approach to maintaining the equipment at the remote sites thus reducing the time that any one site might be down. When a site does go down the information provided by siteVIEW Enterprise enables the field personnel to be well equipped with the parts needed to get the site communicating again. The “new reality” is that the hydro company is saving money and are informed of pending problems that might occur at the site.

siteCOMMANDER (FFSK) modem with siteVIEW Enterprise 1.0

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