Batboard

I have been doing a lot of work at our remote site lately, and with all the new equipment I am wondering how I could monitor the various statuses of things...ac power failure, battery voltage, high/low temp alarm, someday a generator, etc. It has a Zetron paging terminal we could use to page all 3 of us out in case of an alarm but I am not aware of what equipment it would need to make it work.

Birken

What model zetron are you using?

How is the remote site connected? If your using microwave you could utilize the "M" lead signaling back to your dispatch center for each required alarm.

Couple boxes beside Zetron come to my mind; Davicom, by ComLab, Inc., (http://www.comlab.com), and Protek, by Pagetek, (http://www.pagetek.net).

Once you do some site monitoring, you won't want to go back to without it. I've had several instances where a customer's site has monitoring, esp. for forward power; get paged out when the RF power goes below a certain threshold, but before they are conscious of "field units can't hear dispatch". Lets you plan response to growing problems, instead of CRISIS NOW!!!

Davicoms seem much more current designs to me, tho I haven't seen the latest products from Pagetek.

Chuk G.

The question is so open ended....

For connectivity, do you have Ethernet, or some form of IP, T1, or will you want dial up? Will it call into a Network Management system or simple pager.

Do you want only alarms, or do you want it to control your HVAC, or have some logic in it to take action?

Go to http://www.dpstele.com to see what is available. They have nice explainations, white papers and many different products.

Then compare with others like Quest Controls, Hark, Applied Innovation, Optimatele.com.

Good Luck!

RF Dude

I am not really up on the paging, I am more of an electrician/construction guy who knows just enough about radios to get by. I was up there thinking about this post yesterday and should have wrote down the model of the terminal but I did not.

My idea was to have the paging terminal page us out with a simple string of numeric digits with the first three being battery voltage and then the next being a series of zeroes and ones on contact closure for statuses such as power supply alarm, amplifier alarms, AC failure (and restore), high temp, low temp, high humidity, door open, etc.

The paging terminal has 4 DID trunks. I guess from reading the manual it is possible to have it be set off locally too which is what I would want to do.

Right now there is Internet up there, the local internet company is using the site for their wireless service and we have asked them to provide us with a port to the Internet soon, mainly so that if we are up there fixing a problem that we can connect to the Internet and get service manuals, email, etc. without having to drive back to the shop but we might also install a computer there for text paging.

But my main goal here is to have the paging terminal page all 3 of us if there is an alarm of any kind so like you say we can get up there and fix problems quickly before the customers start leaving or the whole place crashes for lack of a 1/2 amp fuse

Thanks,
Birken

Look at the Zetron 1512 Sentridial or 1514 DevicePage
Both will dial a number, or connect to a spare DID trunk. They have 8 inputs (the 1512 also has 4 analoge inputs). You can page a dispalay pager with both. You can do voice messages with the 1512,
http://www.zetron.com