5 Cool things you can monitor at your remote site.

You have to agree that a remote control & monitoring system can be very useful at your remote site. Monitoring different voltages, currents, temperatures, pressures, powers, etc. ensures you have full situational awareness 100% of the time.

Aside from the “normal” things that you’d expect to monitor with pretty much any system (voltage, temperature, current, power…), here are 5 more parameters that could be interesting to monitor.

1. MONITOR YOUR NETWORKS

Monitor the status of your on-site LAN or that of your off-site WAN. Using the Network Ping capability of your intelligent remote control system, ping on-site devices such as transmitters, network switches, encoders or satellite receivers. Also consider pinging off-site IP addresses in order to detect any loss of connection to the outside world. If one of these devices or IP addresses fails to respond, you can use the remote control’s built-in relays to power cycle the unresponsive device, network switch or wireless router.




2. MONITOR YOUR TELEPHONE LINE

Though used less frequently today, dial-up telephone lines still provide reliable backup communications to your sites. If they aren’t used regularly, they can reveal themselves to be defective when you do need them. An intelligent remote control system that checks for dial-tone every 15 minutes can help prevent critical site blackouts when lines go down. Placing this information, black on white with a time-stamp in the system log can also help you prove to your communications provider that their lines are less than reliable when you’re having intermittent line problems.




3. MONITOR THE CUMULATIVE RUN TIME OF YOUR GENERATOR

If you have a generator at your site, you know that you have a preventive maintenance schedule to follow. Use your intelligent remote control system to cumulate the run time of your generator and to include this information in your system log. That way, it is easy to see when your generator is due for its oil change and related maintenance.




4. MONITOR THE DUTY CYCLE OF YOUR COMPRESSOR OR DEHYDRATOR

If your site uses a dehydrator/compressor to pressurise your transmission lines, monitor their operational duty-cycle and detect pressure leaks in your lines. Consider using the daily cumulative run time parameter and set a threshold at, for example 20%, or about 288 minutes per day. If your compressor’s run time goes over this limit you can safely say that you have an important leak in your pressure that needs to be repaired. Setting the threshold to lower values can allow you to detect a leak well before it becomes a major problem.




5. MONITOR WHO IS CALLING

Use your intelligent remote control’s Caller-ID and IP logging capability to see who is accessing (or trying to access) your unit by phone and/or the IP network. This information could be particularly interesting for your IT personnel should they want to monitor the security of your network and communications infrastructure.

These are just a few examples of cool things you can monitor at your remote sites with a properly configured and intelligent remote site monitoring system.