Australian Navy Selects fourtec Wireless System to Overcome 120 meters of Obstacles in Data Transmission
Two decommissioned mine hunter ships from the Australian Royal Navy required monitoring whilst in storage in the Navy's Sydney Port. Each ship comprised ten different chambers, on three different levels including; engine room, control room and bridge. While docked, all hatches would be closed and external dehumidifiers would pump in dry air via ventilation ducts from large external dehumidifiers, 24-hours a day. The ship's air had to be modified and monitored for humidity and temperature. Munters Australia Pty Ltd (www.munters.com.au) was contacted for the task. Munters is a company with offices worldwide that specializes in environment modifying equipment to control humidity. Since they were also required to supply a wireless monitoring, recording and alarm system, they approached Sitest, Amir Antebi's company. Sitest is the distributor of fourtec products in Australia and New Zealand.
Since the request was for a wireless monitoring, recording and remote alarm messages system fourtec's wireless system was found to be the ideal solution. A wireless temperature and humidity data monitoring system, whose main attraction was the ability to provide real-time data and remote alarms, since the ship was docked at quite a distance from the main project control office located about 150meters away in the center of the building without any direct site to the mine-hunters.
An initial concern was that the RF transmission might be disrupted because the navy base area was saturated with active radar signals and other RF transmissions. However, this and other concerns were soon quickly dismissed. On the installation day twenty units were supplied including a receiver unit and a number of repeaters. The base station was established using the fourtec data analysis software and receiver on land, in the project control office away from the ships. On the ship the various cradles were quickly distributed on three levels from the lower engine room to the captain’s bridge and other chambers to be monitored. Two repeaters were used on the ship one at the back of the ship and one on the commander bridge facing the office complex.
To ensure a stable reception from the ship a further repeater was placed in the window of one of the office buildings - providing a direct line-of-site to the ship. So in total three repeaters were necessary to ensure the transfer of data from the ship to the monitoring PC in the office.
Once it had been established that all the loggers' data had been picked up by the ship’s repeaters and were functioning correctly, the next step was to move to the control office from where the centralized computer was working. The same computer was used earlier to set-up and program each of the logger stations via the “auto-setup” function - a particularly useful feature for such multi-system installations.
The system overcame the many hurdles specific to this environment. Not only the high saturation of radar and transmissions, but most of all the fact that the ship was approximately 120m from the office and the office was in the basement of the building. Despite the fact that there was no direct line of sight to the ship, with many obstacles to the line of sight, the system worked smoothly and effectively.
The customer's requirements were fulfilled providing a real-time monitoring of each chamber's condition with remote alarms sent to mobile phones in the case of set-point breaches.
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