Scada software development house, Adroit Technologies, has broken into the satellite earth station monitoring market.
Scada software development house, Adroit Technologies, has broken into the satellite earth station monitoring market.
Installations of the company’s supervisory control and data acquisition (scada) software, Adroit, and the VIZNET portal (an all-in-one application that exposes business and process data with smart client capabilities) is being used successfully at Transtel to monitor and control the supply of bandwidth to organisations thoughout Africa.
Managing director of Adroit, Dave Wibberley says, “This was truly a first for Adroit in this type of application and we are getting more demand for non-traditional industrial scada applications. After all it is just monitoring of realtime data, just not from PLCs. The SNMP capability that we ship as standard with Adroit is being used more and more to monitor control networks, so why not telecommunications networks?”
A true application for the South African market, VIZNET enables remote connectivity over low bandwidth. While the Windows controls and the .Net framework utilised in VIZNET allow for a much richer user interface to be built.
Jacobus 'Proffie' Groenewald, chief engineer technician for Transtel says, “Transtel needed software to monitor the RS system. We approached Adroit as they provided the scada network for Eskom. In addition, Adroit also agreed to write the necessary drivers and do the graphic development. The system is up and has been running very well for the last couple of years.”
Private telecommunications network (PTN) operator, Transtel, is amongst the largest in the southern hemisphere, and its satellite network encompasses the transmission of data, voice and banking services locally and abroad. “The operator had an existing teleport that had to be upgraded as the tracking system and other equipment became obsolete,” says Mike Stevenson, proposal manager for earth station systems supply company, Comscience, – which was awarded the tender. Comscience considered implementing an international scada system, but chose Adroit because local support was important.
The Adroit scada is based in South Africa and used to monitor and control the C-band and KU-band RF (radio frequency) of the satellite antenna that transports data for Transtel throughout South Africa and Africa. The scada controls part of the hub, SSPA (solid state power amplifier) system, uplink power control, up and down converters, and the LNA (low noise amplifier) switch. It also controls the antenna’s tracking system, keeping the narrow beams focused on the satellite, which it trends. A manual master-slave changeover is incorporated, as well as an automatic one, to ensure the systems redundancy.
Monitoring functionality includes the ability to pull system up-time in order to check reliability, performance graphs, event and also alarm logs. The Adroit scada monitors RF output power of the SSPA which is in dbm. The scada converts it from dbm to Watts, which are displayed as a graph. The system enables an operator to manually adjust the transmitter if necessary, should the power go lower than a pre-defined threshold value an alarm is activated.
Alarming is audible and onscreen with colour coding: green for normal operations, yellow for processes that are on standby and red where faults occur. The scada enables a zoom on the fault by clicking the depicted device to view details of the fault. The Adroit system has been configured in such a way that the operator must acknowledge the alarm in order to clear it and logs all changes made by the operator onto the system for accountability and quality control purposes.
Adroit developed several new drivers to add to its already impressive stable of 300. These included SSPA, LNA, UPC (uplink power control), and up/down converters enable the interface between the hardware and the scada system. “Being a local scada company, we had in-house developers who were immediately available to do the development work once we received the protocol from Comscience, who did the hardware,” says Wibberley.
VIZNET provides the global user interface that enables the scada to connect to various data sources enabling monitoring and controlling of the required parameters.
Another first for VIZNET in the visual studio development environment is that functionality is put in vectors. For example, it enables the use of windows picture boxes such as JPEG, GIF or TIFF to be used on the physical depictions. Additionally, it enables the use of Windows data grid controls to display database and event log data. It also enables almost any third party and Windows charting controls.
Comscience implemented the architecture that transmits information from the source via modem (with hot-standby configuration), through an amplifier (also with hot-standby configuration), to the antenna. Low noise amplifiers are used to improve the signal to noise ratio prior to transmission by the modem.
For more information contact Dave Wibberly, Adroit Technologies, +27 (0)11 658 8100, [email protected], www.adroit.co.za
| Tel: | +27 11 658 8100 |
| Fax: | +27 11 658 8101 |
| Email: | [email protected] |
| www: | www.adroit.co.za |
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