900MHZ radios

rleonard

Member
R
Join Date
May 2005
Location
Eastern Oregon
Posts
6
This is a little off topic. We are expanding our PLC Ethernet radio network, to aid in some of the terrain issues and the 2.4 GHz spectrum being cluttered in the area, 900 MHz is being considered. The number of manufacturers and pricing selection is overwhelming. Does anyone have any good or bad experiences that they would like to share or any recommendations?
 
mds inet is what we use. of course it is top of the line and pretty expensive. phoenix contact probably has a more affordable solution.
 
We do a lot of small town water systems and use the Max Stream radios(recently purchaced by digi) Very reliable, inexpensive and just about any configuration you can think of.
 
The 900Mhz band will scatter less (better) with most types of terrain. If you're not worried about slightly higher energy/lower bandwidth, it's probably ideal for your application.

rleonard said:
This is a little off topic. We are expanding our PLC Ethernet radio network, to aid in some of the terrain issues and the 2.4 GHz spectrum being cluttered in the area, 900 MHz is being considered. The number of manufacturers and pricing selection is overwhelming. Does anyone have any good or bad experiences that they would like to share or any recommendations?
Click to expand...
 
Typical unlicensed, 900 Mhz radios use full 1 watt output in the public domain 900Mhz ISM band.

2.4Ghz radios typically output 100 to 200 mW and rely on very high gain, directional anntennas, 15+ dB

The antenna cable losses in 2.4Ghz band are slightly higher, meaning less flexibility in antenna placement in relation to the radio.

900 Mhz seems to have better punch through capabilities than 2.4Ghz, when used for I/O radio (very small 'packets').

In the end, the freq band will probably be determined by thenature of the data you're dealing - volume and required throughput rate.

Dan
 
There are lots of suppliers making the Ethernet wireless comms now, but not many offering wireless for analog or discrete signals.

Banner Engineering makes some rock solid solutions for Wireless IO connections. If you want to connect to real world IO and have this be the wireless wire. I have done a number of jobs where this has worked really well.

Water Tower Application

SteelMill

Site Survey

They have not come out with a Wireless Ethernet product, but we are testing their wireless RS-485 product right now.

Joe_WaZoo
 
Joe_WaZoo said:
There are lots of suppliers making the Ethernet wireless comms now, but not many offering wireless for analog or discrete signals.

Banner Engineering makes some rock solid solutions for Wireless IO connections. If you want to connect to real world IO and have this be the wireless wire. I have done a number of jobs where this has worked really well.

Water Tower Application

SteelMill

Site Survey

They have not come out with a Wireless Ethernet product, but we are testing their wireless RS-485 product right now.

Joe_WaZoo
Click to expand...
Some of their sales guys were in the plant the other day and said that they had a couple of the Banner units at a location where one was 3 stories underground and at a MMC and the other was at ground level and they worked seamlessly together.
 
We used ESTeem RF Modems for serial communications. They are also a Rockwell Encompass Partner, if AB is involved. (They are located in Washington State)

Bob A.
 
Craig,

That test underground was done at a Semiconductor plant in Austin, TX. I could not believe the amount of Process automation equipment I saw at that plant that would normally by dubbed as a Factory Automation business. They have since installed a couple of the wireless systems there and are working just fine. Talk to your local guys and they will let you borrow a system to play with. It's really easy stuff to use. The radios were designed all in house by Banner Engineering so they are always adding new products to the mix.

I would like to get some kits together here in 2008 and start to add Wireless classes to my training schedules.

Joe_WaZoo
 
I've used MDS with good results, and I also use a lot of DataRadio HiPR-900 radios. The HiPR radios offer parallel receive using a second receive-only antenna if you have any spots with marginal performance. I used a set of three to bridge an Ethernet network over a 5-mile span (customer was connecting a remote HMI to their plant SCADA system.)
 

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