SCADA Data Radio How to choose

If you need to design or set up a field of outdoor wireless radio telemetry sites, how do you pick a good radio from all available sources? If you are looking for telemetry speeds of 9600bps or less, than your options have increased to include some of the newest and most important specifications like sensitivity. Sensitivity is the ability to receive signals and often the deciding choice when in an RF noisy or difficult environment (Trees, obstacles etc). Measured in dBm a radio with -98dBm can hear signals that are half the power of a radio that is -95dBm, as each 3dBm represents a power factor of two. (As the dBm number increases, the receiver gets better as this is a negative number) In the Spread Spectrum world the standard receiver sensitivity seems to be around -108dBm at a bit error rate of 10-6, this is a good standard to compare against and the radio we are comparing here uses this standard. New advances in RF and micros has giving us even more sensitive radios than this! A new slower version of a popular spread spectrum hopping data radio is now available and is tested to -116dBm! This is a power factor four over the -108dBm radios. The only catch is that the radio maximum baud rate is 19.2kbps, this is totally acceptable for 99% of the telemetry jobs we have seen and should fit nicely in our future plans for field scada installations.These radios also add a new feature called FEC or Forward Error Correction, this automatically corrects simple bit level errors and thus reduces the need to retransmit on most errors, therefore further increasing the reliability and sensitivity of the radio. Field testing has proven these radios to outperform previous 1W Spread spectrum radios. These tests also show the ability to reduce power requirements to run these systems on Solar Panels in remote Northern Latitudes(>50deg). A sample system setup and ready to poll your rtu is available now for as little as $425CDN each. Contact scada@outlaw.ca for more information or quotes and path studies. More Info and help is available at Outlaw Automation Inc

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