Calamp Viper SC+ 400 IP Router/Radio Config Help

Hello all,

I'm new to this forum so bear with me if at all possible. The system I have is a Master radio at our main office and one repeater on a hill, then several direct and distant remotes that come back and using Wonderware we are able to monitor all remote sites. I had a radio go bad and when I replaced it and went into the web config for the radio I accidentally added duplicate IP's not knowing that the old one would still exist in the neighbor table. I have now gotten everything to come back and my new config is exactly the same as the original radios config but I still have a unit status of: Vipr Configuration Mismatch (followed by two of the same MAC addresses). I did a manual scan on the repeater and the new radio I installed on the neighbor table. I'm wondering if my initial screw up means I need to go back and delete the radio completely out of both neighbor tables and start over.. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Todd

Does the neighbor table still show both radios in the list? Through the browser interface, there is a button to delete a single station (by MAC ID). I have had situations where deleting one station deleted all of them, so I have taken up the practice of saving the configuration settings to the radio before I do any major mods to the settings. It gives me a fallback position that I can get to quickly if I screw it all up.

Also, that alarm on the main status page might be "old news" The radio might be happy now, just reporting that it did have a problem. Can you get it to "go away: by acknowledging it?

The neighbor table of the radio I replaced only has the one radio now. The repeater also only has the one radio in it's neighbor table. The Unit status shows duplicate MAC addresses for the configuration error like I still have an issue. Previously when I had duplicate IP's with different MAC addresses it showed up something like this (Vipr Configuration Mismatch 809DF1 809FC1) Now that I've changed the MAC address and deleted the old radio it has two of the same MAC addresses (809DF1 809Df1). I have the radio completely deleted in the Neighbor table of the master station. If I acknowledge the status alarm it returns upon reset of the radio and I am not able to ping out to the repeater.

I should add that I'm brand new to IP radios and even more so to the Calamp Vipers. I am working on equipment that I didn't install or set up, and this is as far as I've gotten. Thanks for the reply.

Todd

I inherited a brood of Vipers myself, and they bit me enough times, I finally yanked them out. With that said, I learned a few things over the year or so I worked with them.

About neighbor scanning ... and this might be my own misunderstanding ... so don't take it as fact... When you "Manual Scan" for neighbors, I think that the radio will interrogate other radios it finds and learn not only their connection info, but also the contents of their neighbor tables. When you "Auto Scan" it seems that any other Viper that is not set to disabled will also go into Auto Scan mode even though you didn't do it from the Global commands webpage. I might be wrong about this, but I am pretty sure I saw this happen multiple times.

I had a network with one master PLC and 7 slaves and I did not want any of the other slaves talking to anybody but the master. It seemed that any time I did Auto Scan, that some old bogus information would get propagated to all the radios in the network. I eventually got to the point that I always left Scan mode disabled and used static entries for everything period. Even if I had to get in the truck and drive to the other site to ensure I didn't screw up the whole network, I avoided scanning for neighbors and that helped greatly. At one point I had an old radio we used for a 5 minute test that I could not get completely removed from all the "real" neighbors tables.

So what I am getting at is maybe one of your other radios "learned" about the radio which is no longer present and has since shared that neighbor entry with its buddies so that there is still an instance of it floating around the network somewhere. You would not think it should show up as a status alarm on a radio that doesn't show it listed, but I am by no means an expert and have not seen that specific problem.

That helps me out a lot. The network I have has 33 radios on it and every one that I have connected with has all 33 in it's neighbor table and set to manual scan. So if this is the case, I'm most likely going to have to either go to each radio and disable the scan and delete the old radio, or try deleting the new one in both places I entered it and try adding the radio with a whole new IP maybe. I'm not sure, but off I go to try! Thanks for the help, if you think of anything else I'd gladly take the information.

Todd

Tpetie3509 said:

That helps me out a lot. The network I have has 33 radios on it and every one that I have connected with has all 33 in it's neighbor table and set to manual scan. So if this is the case, I'm most likely going to have to either go to each radio and disable the scan and delete the old radio, or try deleting the new one in both places I entered it and try adding the radio with a whole new IP maybe. I'm not sure, but off I go to try! Thanks for the help, if you think of anything else I'd gladly take the information.

Todd

Click to expand...

You might be able to access the remote radios over the air via its web browser from another unit that has a good link with it. It might be painfully slow, but not as slow as 33 road trips...

When I was trying to sort things out, I had a timer in the PLC logic I could set to a high value to increase a delay between polling cycles to add some "dead air time" to the network which allowed the browser to work adequately enough for most purposes.

The drawback is that if you break an important comm link while working over the air, you might be stuck and down until you hop in the truck and drive to the site and bring it back up.

I am on 15 minute polling as of now. I got rid of the configuration mismatch, but still am having trouble talking to the repeater with the radio. I have pretty direct line of sight to the repeater from the site, but for some reason cannot get it to come up with a ping test and have no communication with it still. I resorted to deleting the neighbor table yesterday evening and just tried to enter the repeater statically to no avail. I'm ready to scrap these radios after the water season. This is day 5 on this project, quite the humbling.

Todd

Are you using router mode on all the radios? To use a repeater, the repeater and the slaves behind it will need to "know about" the repeater and the master. You will need the slaves tables entries to show the master and the correct number of hops, along with the Mac id of the repeater in the primary route. Likewise in the master. It's entry for a slave behind a repeater needs to have 2 hops and the Mac id of the repeater as "next hop".

Yeah all radios are in router mode. That's what the Calamp guy told me too. The strange thing is when I open the neighbor table on the master radio all of the radios show 1 hop, but some have the next hop set as the repeater and some the master. I will try that though and see what I come up with, and report back. Thanks.

Todd

Whenever I ran an auto (or manual) scan, the properties would sometimes pick a path with multiple hops, but it would show up with a "1". A few times I experimented with repeating I had to manual edit the route to put a "2" in there. I didn't get better results by repeating and didn't really need that feature in my situation. Before I gave up on those radios, I only had one node that would stop replying to messages (for up to an hour at a time) and was using Wireshark to inspect traffic (per tech support advice). While I was monitoring from the master, I started getting PLC message errors from my problem node. I was able to (over the airwaves) access the webpage of the radio that refused to complete the messages at that very same time. So I knew that it was not a path or radio to radio problem, rather some mysterious behind the scenes issue that was causing my woes. That was when I said to hell with it, I am going to put in some cheap serial radios and be done with this battle.

I did have good ping results. I was able to use the webpage to view the RSSI numbers for all the nodes. I was able to test for connectivity successfully on all nodes. Sometimes the test for connectivity would not succeed on one or more nodes even while communication was good, so I didn't put too much stock in that test, but if it succeeds, it is basically the same as a single good ping test proving the radio configuration was at least valid and the airwave path was adequate.

When I got tech support involved, they sent me a link to viper config tools software and had me run the ping test with 200 pings per node and their benchmark was 97% success. I got 100% on all but two nodes and those were 99 and 98.

When I can remote browse a radio and it simultaneously won't pass 100 byte PLC packet end to end...that was enough for me to throw in the towel. I asked the tech support guy (via email) a few other questions about the route and what happens "behind the scenes" but didn't get a response. His response was that I first needed a "good ping results and clean wireshark". I am not sure if he knew how to answer or was just following a prescribed list of troubleshooting steps.

I didn't see anything too extraordinary in my wireshark traces. There was an occasional gratuitous ARP (that was supposed to be filtered by having TCP Proxy enabled on all radios). And occasionally I would get a "TCP window full" in the list and never bothered trying to track down the meaning of that.

Serial radios are so much simpler. I had a SLC 5/05 as the master and ML1400 as all the slaves with a free serial port, so that is the direction I ended up going. I needed the UHF frequency for physical reasons and it was already licensed, so we used Maxons since we have good pricing and experience with them.

The Phoenix TWE IP radios (900 Mhz) are much better if we need to get remote access to a PLC for programming over the air. I could occasionally get RSLinx to see a remote PLC over one of my Vipers, but wouldn't dream of trying to upload or download. I got online once (with a matching file) over the air with a Viper but it was uselessly slow.

With the Phoenix TWE, I have even performed a download through a repeater, although I don't recommend it, I was in a pinch. Monitoring and doing online edits is pretty fast and reliable with the Phoenix.

Since you mentioned that you are polling every fifteen minutes...that would indicate that your PLCs will have the potential to break and reopen connections. I was polling (one read and one write per node) 7 slaves in about 5-10 seconds, so I had my message connection timeouts set to 30000 milliseconds on all the PLCs. This connection opening and closing and how Allen Bradley PLCs do it at the nuts and bolt levels can be problematic according to my Cal Amp manual.

I am off on a tangent, you need to get them all talking first...Gosh It is sad that I had to learn so much about those silly things only to give up on them.

What should I be lpoking at for RSSI values? Even my closest and most visible remotes to the repeater are in the mid -70 range. 1-2 miles away and I can literally see the repeater from the station. I'm starting to think there is a bigger problem going on then just what I'm struggling with. With the connectivity test I get reachable everything between the remote in question and the repeater but I can't from a ping test and the PLC is not talking to the SCADA as it should be. I am so new with radios that I'm a bit overwhlemed. If I went serial on all of them I'm assuming I could use the same antenna equipment I have now? There is no way I should be struggling this long just to get one radio to talk. From looking at the original radio it had much better RSSI values last year and was hopping through another remote site that wasn't even set up as a relay point?? I found strange as no other site had that going on. Sorry in advance if there is mispelling/poor grammar. I'm on a phone at thus point.

Todd

I had RSSI numbers as good as -59 and as bad as -96. The site I had the most trouble with had the lowest RSSI (-92 to -96) so that is why I suspected a path problem first, upgraded the yagi, improved the aiming, got it up around -85 before I gave up. I had another site that was consistently around -92 that never gave me any trouble.

Are you getting any successful messages through? Can you ping the remote from the master (through the repeater) from a command prompt?

If you can't ping it, can't get any messages through, but do have good radio paths, it is probably configuration related.

At one point I had a remote talking in circles to another remote because I had performed an autoscan and there was old info in some of the radios' neighbor tables.

As for radios in general, I now have the habit of using Google earth to create a map with all the sites and radio paths. In Earth, create a folder for the name of the whole system then add sites (placemarks) and paths inside the folder. You can right click on a path and "view elevation profile". The elevation profile can be altitude adjusted if, for example, your antennas are 5 meters off the ground, you can make the path 5 meters off the ground. The whole path can only be set at one elevation, which is a minor drawback. But the elevation profile will tell you the exact distance, and reveal the terrain between the sites.

Ubiquiti has an online tool that will let you set the antenna heights individually and show the fresnel zones, but I have only used it a little and did not find a way to put multiple sites on it and save the resulting maps.

With Earth, you can right click on the folder and save as *.kmz. I have a kmz file for all my customers with radios now and it is very helpful. Another way it is helpful is for antenna aiming. You can zoom in and find a landmark reference to assist you in aiming antennas more precisely.

Antenna designs are based on frequency. If you switches to 900MHz, you would probably want to change antennas, but I have gotten away with using the wrong antennas when the paths were very clear and short. But switching to serial at the same frequency would not require you to do this.

I have only been doing this for about two years now, but have worked on about a dozen different systems, so I am getting a pretty good feel for estimating (and I emphasize that it is an estimate) what will likely work by looking at a kmz file and elevation profiles.

I have been surprised a couple of times, like how well the UHF frequencies travel over hills and obstacles and another time where I just had to clear a small hill with a 900MHz radio 1/2 mile away and it was erratic until we raised the master antenna 40'.

I have also been surprised to find some sites elevations are drastically different than I expected. One site was 100' higher than the master 2 miles away but driving between sites, you'd swear they are on about the same plane.

I am not by any means a radio engineer or experienced expert, barely comprehend the fresnel zone thing...

http://wisptools.net/book/bookc4s3.php

One thing I learned early on was about antenna polarization. All the yagis need to have the same polarization which basically means they need to be mounted the same orientation... I had a self induced radio problem because I haphazardly mounted a yagi with the tines horizontal instead of vertical. It worked, but got a lot of errors until we went back and rotated it 90 degrees.

https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ind...reless-communication-64-728.jpg?cb=1276697969

I suspect that there is a configuration issue with yours. One of those radios is sending your data to the wrong node and it is getting dropped off in cyberspace.

This last link to the Ubiquiti tool is aimed at their wifi products but there are some options to choose different frequencies that are closer to what you are working with. I ended up getting accustomed to using Google Earth and a little imagination to compensate for its shortcomings. There may be a better software tool for this, and I would probably pay a reasonable price for one that integrated well with Google Earth. My hour or two of searching about a year ago didn't turn up anything user friendly enough for me.

https://airlink.ubnt.com/#/

To make sure I understand... You had a working system and a radio got toasted, and you replaced it...is this correct? And if so, for how long was it working well?

Not directly relevant, but if you're doing a fair bit of radio stuff then a great program for checking link feasibility and theoretical performance is radio mobile. It's free and easy to use if you understand the basics of radio.

A site visit to each site should be undertaken though.. losses due to foliage / local obstructions can be a deal breaker or require a much higher mast.

I use it a lot for planning new systems / adding sites to existing networks

Thanks for all the info, It's helping me out a ton as I will be continuing to work on this system for the untold future.. I ended up switching the radio out for a known good one that was configured at our shop with a different IP and configured everything around it. It's working, kind of. Being configured here in the shop It's trying to come directly back to here without going through the repeater first. Problem is, the neighbor table has already had a manual scan done, and it's working good enough to be of use but not as good as I'd like, and I'm afraid to change any settings for I'm pretty sure that's what got me into the problem with the first radio, in the first place.

The original was working as of last year, I powered it up and it wasn't working. My coworker who has been here for a while has little to no experience and doesn't know how radios work at all (neither do I so I don't hold it against him). So I tried to swap the radio out, with the same IP and different MAC addresses (I believe if I had the same MAC and Radio IP I would have been okay), so I had the configuration mismatch. I tried to globally change the original to the new MAC and that didn't work. Then I eventually deleted it globally and started over. At one point I could ping the repeater but not knowing what I was doing I kept trying different stuff. Once I had gone to the repeater and back plugging in each time and had done several manual scans on both the remote and the repeater is when I got online and tried finding someone who knew anything more than me, and stumbled upon some great knowledge!

Todd