Surely you don’t want to unroll and roll up a 50 metre network cable?
One of our mining customers came to us with a very specific problem: how to get telemetry data off a pressure monitoring rig over at the monitoring caravan?
Their idea was to use a 50m network cable but I think they would quickly get sick of unrolling it and rolling it up. In a hostile environment like that, I don’t know how long a network cable would last in that sort of environment with the possibility of it being driven over.
My suggestion was to use a wireless bridge utilising Ubiquiti Bullet Titanium 2.4GHz radios with one mounted on the pressure monitoring rig and one on the monitoring caravan. Although in urban areas 2.4GHz is pretty well congested and 5GHz would be recommended, out in remote areas with little other wifi traffic, the additional range of 2.4GHz might be useful.
The Bullet Titanium (actually aluminium cased) has several advantages for this situation:
- It runs on Passive PoE (24 Volts) so it can be connected directly to the monitoring rig’s electrical system
- It is compact
- It is rugged with an operating temperature range of -40C to +80C
We teamed the Bullet with a 9dBi omnidirectional antenna that was about 500mm long and gave a good vertical beam spread so that if the caravan was parked on a ridge or in a gully then the signal would still be received strongly. It is possible to increase the range of the Bullet by using a longer omni antenna or by using a dish but the antenna we used provided a range of several kilometres.
If you have a wireless bridging challenge, have a talk to us to see what we can come up with. We utilise products from several manufacturers to suit the site specific requirements.
