Radios turn to wireless metering

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Feb 10, 2003

The Sentinel range of digital data radios for utilities applications (electricity, gas and water) are the latest addition to the ScanLink range of telemetry radios.

Wood and Douglas has a new range of Sentinel digital data radios for utilities applications (electricity, gas and water), the latest addition to its ScanLink range of telemetry radios.

The Sentinel range is designed for data transmission applications within Scada systems supporting both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint operation.

These digital radios are a major development allowing network management techniques with remote diagnostics to be applied seamlessly to a radio system.

There are three devices in the range.

The ER450 digital outstation radio features high-speed datarates up to 19200baud in a 25kHz channel and 9600baud in a 12.5kHz channel with two separate data inputs and multiplexer.

Its 'store and forward' capability allows for extended geographic coverage which is particularly useful for secondary automation networks and remote outstations.

For users in the UK its wide switching bandwidth of 15MHz (for this and all Sentinel products) will allow the forthcoming change of frequencies to the utilities telemetry band to be made without changing outstation hardware.

A major benefit is that changes in frequency can be made remotely from any site, outstation, scanner or control, without visiting the other sites.

A full-duplex version is also available.

The EB450 digital basestation features full duplex operation, remote diagnostics and a comprehensive network management system that operates unobtrusively without interrupting the system data flow.

Finally, the EH450 duplicated digital basestation has a modular design comprising two identical EB450 basestations linked to a central, fail- safe monitoring and change-over controller.

Any of these units can be taken out of service for maintenance without system downtime.

Changeover is triggered automatically by alarm conditions in either radio or under control of the network management system.

Duplicated systems are usually employed when it is critical that the base radio doesn't fail for example in installations where many outstation radios are polled from a scanner (basestation) site.