Data Radio Modem
Radius design and manufactures a range of digital data radio modems for OEM applications for use in remote control, telemetry, SCADA, alarm monitoring and mission critical systems. Using the latest in digital data radio technology these products are used by utilities and industry alike. They are designed to provide wide area system coverage to ensure reliable, secure and cost effective transmission of critical data to remote sites. The range is made up of 2 product types. The PDR 221 which is a transparent digital data radio modem, and the PDR 121 which is a multi-repeating digital data radio. Both products come with advanced features which allow remote frequency change, remote power adjustment, BER test functions and non-intrusive real time remote diagnostics.
Treat your telemetry to an upgrade, choose the Radius PDR data radio.
PDR 121 Data Radio ModemThe Radius 121 is designed to allow a user to configure a wide area digital data radio network, without having to go to the cost of installing an expensive infrastructure. Each PDR 121 acts as an independent repeater and can forward messages to any other PDR 121. In fact a message can travel via 6 PDR 121’s before reaching its destination. In order to achieve this, the PDR 121 needs to look at the address information in the data packet it is transmitting. Therefore there is a list of most commonly used protocols in the configuration menu of the radio for the user to simply select, and if the protocol you want isn’t in the list, don’t panic, the configuration menu allows you enter the characteristics of the protocol you are using. So whether it’s a state of the art new installation or an upgrade of a legacy protocol system the PDR 121 digital data radio modem is the first choice.
PDR 221 Data Radio ModemIf wide area coverage is not as important to you as system data speed, the PDR 221, with its very low system latency is the ideal choice. Designed for transparent use with a low latency overhead the PDR 221 offers the user all the remote features of the PDR 121 but without the multi-repeat. But just in case you can’t reach all your sites directly, you can configure one of the PDR 221 to act as a dedicated repeater and if that won’t do the trick, then the back-to-back function allows you to connect two PDR 221’s together to give you extended coverage. And as in the PDR 121 you still get the benefit of the BER (Bit Error Rate) test function, the remote frequency and power change and the real-time non-intrusive diagnostics.
HSC 100 Hot Standby Basestation ControllerThe HSC 100 is specifically designed to provide a high level of security against loss of telemetry data in a SCADA network. The HSC 100 monitors data traffic to and from the data radio master site and determines whether the current master data radio is experiencing communication problems. It will then switch over to another standby master data radio in order to maintain system reliability.
Why Choose a Wireless SolutionWireless communications remains the most cost effective solution for a significant amount of modern remote control/monitoring or telemetry applications. Advances in wireless technology allow data throughput and reliability to be very high and, given the costs of direct cabling or satellite infrastructure the price/performance benefits remain far above other means of communication. Modern wireless data radio devices are much more than simple modems. They are sophisticated units, designed to allow the user to create their own data radio communication system with a minimum amount of involvement either in set up or during the life time of the system.
SCADA
SCADA (Supervisory, Control and Data Acquisition) is a term that covers a large number of varying remote control applications in a large number of different industries and markets.
To Radius it simply means a system that provides the customer with the level of remote control and monitoring they require to improve their productivity and security. It can be a control system for an industrial processing plant, to waste water management over a large geographic area. Through our product Uni-View, Radius has been meeting the needs of a diverse range of customers for decades. Radius delivers tailored SCADA control systems to exact customer requirements in a timely and cost efficient manner. Radius provides full training and support for all its SCADA systems and we our proud of our customer loyalty and recommendations.Uni-View
Applications
Uni-View is a SCADA system that gives you full control over your assets. Uni-View provides a secure supervision and control system for reduction of costs, improved productivity, security and quality. The configuration tools are easy to use. Powerful features make the system fast and simple to configure. Systems can be delivered with new control equipment or costs can be kept to a minimum by utilising existing control equipment and allowing Uni-View to provide the advance features. Any system can be further complemented at any time with new outstations (understations) from any manufacturer.
Uni-View is so versatile and flexible that it is used in a wide range of industries and markets, from Absolut Vodkas production line to radio network management at major electricity utilities in the UK. It has been used in applications in the Water and Waste Water Industries, District Heating, Industrial Process Control, Transportation and Tunnels to Electricity Distribution Networks. Radius can provide just the SCADA package for OEMs to use or can engineer the entire system end-to-end for the customer.
Overview
Radius has successfully developed solutions within wireless data communication and remote automation since the company started in 1992.Our success has a solid base - we provide wireless communication solutions based on digital radio techniques. These can be delivered as single units or as complete systems for control, supervision or automation within many areas of application.
Distribution Automation
Communication
SCADA
Services
As customers and regulators demand an ever increasing level of Quality of Supply, it has fallen to the Electricity Utilities to find ways of improving their levels of service whilst at the same time reducing operating costs. One way of achieving this is to provide remote control to their Distribution Network, and in some cases provide automated responses to faults within their network. Radius provides a range of products in the NetMan family that allow customers to provide wide area remote control of their electricity network. Stand alone or as an extension to an existing SCADA network, the NetMan family offers remote control of both pole and ground mounted switchgear for overhead or cable networks.
As prices increase for installing cable or fibre networks to remote locations, and demand for monitoring and controlling devices at remote sites increases . Being able to cover wide area networks reliable and securely is paramount. The Radius PDR range of wireless digital data radio modems provides customers with easy to install, wide area radio network technology which is both fast and secure. With a large amount of protocols available it can be configured to work with nearly any installed equipment. Whether it is scanned telemetry, remote alarm monitoring, SCADA backbone or a simple point-to-point system, the PDR handles it all.
Supervisory Command and Data Acquisition (SCADA) or remote control requires a powerful platform to launch all the features that customers expect. The Uni-View SCADA control system is designed to be used in a range of applications from District Heating to Water and Waste Water control, Industrial Process Automation to Electricity Distribution networks. Radius can engineer Uni-View system to match exactly the customers needs through its versatile modular software package. The interface and displays are all tailored to suit the customer requirements and future proofing and expansion are all in-built.
Since Radius is a solutions provider our offer does not stop or start at the system level, we also provided support services in the area of communication surveys, antenna and radio installations, project management and of course systems integration.
AutomationAutomation (ancient Greek: = self dictated), roboticization[1] or industrial automation or numerical control is the use of control systems such as computers to control industrial machinery and processes, replacing human operators. In the scope of industrialization, it is a step beyond mechanization. Whereas mechanization provided human operators with machinery to assist them with the physical requirements of work, automation greatly reduces the need for human sensory and mental requirements as well.
Automation plays an increasingly important role in the global economy and in daily experience. Engineers strive to combine automated devices with mathematical and organizational tools to create complex systems for a rapidly expanding range of applications and human activities.
There are still many jobs which are in no immediate danger of automation. No device has been invented which can match the human eye for accuracy and precision in many tasks; nor the human ear. Even the admittedly handicapped human is able to identify and distinguish among far more scents than any automated device. Human pattern recognition, language recognition, and language production ability is well beyond anything currently envisioned by automation engineers.
Specialised hardened computers, referred to as programmable logic controllers (PLCs), are frequently
used to synchronize the flow of inputs from (physical) sensors and events with the flow of outputs to actuators and events. This leads to precisely controlled actions that permit a tight control of almost any industrial process. (It was these devices that were feared to be vulnerable to the "Y2K bug", with such potentially dire consequences, since they are now so ubiquitous throughout the industrial world.)
Human-machine interfaces (HMI) or computer human interfaces (CHI), formerly known as man-machine interfaces, are usually employed to communicate with PLCs and other computers, such as entering and monitoring temperatures or pressures for further automated control or emergency response. Service personnel who monitor and control these interfaces are often referred to as stationary engineers.
Another form of automation involving computers is test automation, where computer-controlled automated test equipment is programmed to simulate human testers in manually testing an application. This is often accomplished by using test automation tools to generate special scripts (written as computer programs) that direct the automated test equipment in exactly what to do in order to accomplish the tests
Finally, the last form of automation is software-automation, where a computer by means of macro recorder software records the sequence of user actions (mouse and keyboard) as a macro for playback at a later time.
Contents
Social issues of automation
Automation raises several important social issues. Among them is automation's impact on employment. Indeed, the Luddites were a social movement of English textile workers in the early 1800s who protested against Jacquard's automated weaving looms[2]— often by destroying such textile machines— that they felt threatened their jobs. Since then, the term luddite has come to be applied freely to anyone who is against any advance of technology.
Some argue automation leads to higher employment. One author made the following case. When automation was first introduced, it caused widespread fear. It was thought that the displacement of human workers by computerized systems would lead to severe unemployment. In fact, the opposite has often been true, e.g., the freeing up of the labor force allowed more people to enter higher skilled jobs, which are typically higher paying. One odd side effect of this shift is that "unskilled labor" now benefits in many "first-world" nations, because fewer people are available to fill such jobs.
Some argue the reverse, at least in the long term. They argue that automation has only just begun and short-term conditions might partially obscure its long-term impact. Many manufacturing jobs left the United States during the early 1990s, but a one-time massive increase in IT jobs (which are only now being outsourced), at the same time, offset this.
It appears that automation does devalue labor through its replacement with less-expensive machines; however, the overall effect of this on the workforce as a whole remains unclear. Today automation of the workforce is quite advanced, and continues to advance increasingly more rapidly throughout the world and is encroaching on ever more skilled jobs, yet during the same period the general well-being of most people in the world (where political factors have not muddied the picture) has increased dramatically. What role automation has played in these changes has not been well studied.
One irony is that in recent years, outsourcing has been blamed for the loss of jobs in which automation is the more likely culprit[3]. This argument is supported by the fact that in the U.S., the number of insourced jobs is increasing at a greater rate than those outsourced[4]. Further, the rate of decline in U.S. manufacturing employment is no greater than the worldwide average: 11 percent between 1995 and 2002[5]. In the same period, China, which has been frequently criticized for "stealing" American manufacturing jobs, lost 15 million manufacturing jobs of its own (about 15% of its total), compared with 2 million lost in the U.S.[6].
Millions of human telephone operators and answerers, throughout the world, have been replaced wholly (or almost wholly) by automated telephone switchboards and answering machines (not by Indian or Chinese workers). Thousands of medical researchers have been replaced in many medical tasks from 'primary' screeners in electrocardiography or radiography, to laboratory analyses of human genes, sera, cells, and tissues by automated systems. Even physicians have been partly replaced by remote, automated robots and by highly sophisticated surgical robots that allow them to perform remotely and at levels of accuracy and precision otherwise not normally possible for the average physician. See Robot doctors and Surgical robots.
[edit] Current emphases in automation
Currently, for manufacturing companies, the purpose of automation has shifted from increasing productivity and reducing costs, to broader issues, such as increasing quality and flexibility in the manufacturing process.
The old focus on using automation simply to increase productivity and reduce costs was seen to be short-sighted, because it is also necessary to provide a skilled workforce who can make repairs and manage the machinery. Moreover, the initial costs of automation were high and often could not be recovered by the time entirely new manufacturing processes replaced the old. (Japan's "robot junkyards" were once world famous in the manufacturing industry.)
Automation is now often applied primarily to increase quality in the manufacturing process, where automation can increase quality substantially. For example, automobile and truck pistons used to be installed into engines manually. This is rapidly being transitioned to automated machine installation, because the error rate for manual installment was around 1-1.5%, but has been reduced to 0.00001% with automation. Hazardous operations, such as oil refining, the manufacturing of industrial chemicals, and all forms of metal working, were always early contenders for automation.
Another major shift in automation is the increased emphasis on flexibility and convertibility in the manufacturing process. Manufacturers are increasingly demanding the ability to easily switch from manufacturing Product A to manufacturing Product B without having to completely rebuild the production lines.
[edit] Safety issues of automation
One safety issue with automation is that while it is often viewed as a way to minimize human error in a system, increasing the degree and levels of automation also increases the
consequences of error. For example, The Three Mile Island nuclear event was largely due to over-reliance on "automated safety" systems. Unfortunately, in the event, the designers had never anticipated the actual failure mode which occurred, so both the "automated safety" systems and their human overseers were innundated with vast amounts of largely irrelevant information. With automation we have machines designed by (fallible) people with high levels of expertise, which operate at speeds well beyond human ability to react, being operated by people with relatively more limited education (or other failings, as in the Bhopal disaster or Chernobyl disaster). Ultimately, with increasing levels of automation over ever larger domains of activities, when something goes wrong the consequences rapidly approach the catastrophic. This is true for all complex systems however, and one of the major goals of safety engineering for nuclear reactors, for example, is to make safety mechanisms as simple and as foolproof as possible (see Safety engineering and passive safety).
Another form of automation involving computers is test automation, where computer-controlled automated test equipment is programmed to simulate human testers in manually testing an application. This is often accomplished by using test automation tools to generate special scripts (written as computer programs) that direct the automated test equipment in exactly what to do in order to accomplish the tests
Finally, the last form of automation is software-automation, where a computer by means of macro recorder software records the sequence of user actions (mouse and keyboard) as a macro for playback at a later time.
Contents
Social issues of automation
Automation raises several important social issues. Among them is automation's impact on employment. Indeed, the Luddites were a social movement of English textile workers in the early 1800s who protested against Jacquard's automated weaving looms[2]— often by destroying such textile machines— that they felt threatened their jobs. Since then, the term luddite has come to be applied freely to anyone who is against any advance of technology.
Some argue automation leads to higher employment. One author made the following case. When automation was first introduced, it caused widespread fear. It was thought that the displacement of human workers by computerized systems would lead to severe unemployment. In fact, the opposite has often been true, e.g., the freeing up of the labor force allowed more people to enter higher skilled jobs, which are typically higher paying. One odd side effect of this shift is that "unskilled labor" now benefits in many "first-world" nations, because fewer people are available to fill such jobs.
Some argue the reverse, at least in the long term. They argue that automation has only just begun and short-term conditions might partially obscure its long-term impact. Many manufacturing jobs left the United States during the early 1990s, but a one-time massive increase in IT jobs (which are only now being outsourced), at the same time, offset this.
It appears that automation does devalue labor through its replacement with less-expensive machines; however, the overall effect of this on the workforce as a whole remains unclear. Today automation of the workforce is quite advanced, and continues to advance increasingly more rapidly throughout the world and is encroaching on ever more skilled jobs, yet during the same period the general well-being of most people in the world (where political factors have not muddied the picture) has increased dramatically. What role automation has played in these changes has not been well studied.
One irony is that in recent years, outsourcing has been blamed for the loss of jobs in which automation is the more likely culprit[3]. This argument is supported by the fact that in the U.S., the number of insourced jobs is increasing at a greater rate than those outsourced[4]. Further, the rate of decline in U.S. manufacturing employment is no greater than the worldwide average: 11 percent between 1995 and 2002[5]. In the same period, China, which has been frequently criticized for "stealing" American manufacturing jobs, lost 15 million manufacturing jobs of its own (about 15% of its total), compared with 2 million lost in the U.S.[6].
Millions of human telephone operators and answerers, throughout the world, have been replaced wholly (or almost wholly) by automated telephone switchboards and answering machines (not by Indian or Chinese workers). Thousands of medical researchers have been replaced in many medical tasks from 'primary' screeners in electrocardiography or radiography, to laboratory analyses of human genes, sera, cells, and tissues by automated systems. Even physicians have been partly replaced by remote, automated robots and by highly sophisticated surgical robots that allow them to perform remotely and at levels of accuracy and precision otherwise not normally possible for the average physician. See Robot doctors and Surgical robots.
[edit] Current emphases in automation
Currently, for manufacturing companies, the purpose of automation has shifted from increasing productivity and reducing costs, to broader issues, such as increasing quality and flexibility in the manufacturing process.
The old focus on using automation simply to increase productivity and reduce costs was seen to be short-sighted, because it is also necessary to provide a skilled workforce who can make repairs and manage the machinery. Moreover, the initial costs of automation were high and often could not be recovered by the time entirely new manufacturing processes replaced the old. (Japan's "robot junkyards" were once world famous in the manufacturing industry.)
Automation is now often applied primarily to increase quality in the manufacturing process, where automation can increase quality substantially. For example, automobile and truck pistons used to be installed into engines manually. This is rapidly being transitioned to automated machine installation, because the error rate for manual installment was around 1-1.5%, but has been reduced to 0.00001% with automation. Hazardous operations, such as oil refining, the manufacturing of industrial chemicals, and all forms of metal working, were always early contenders for automation.
Another major shift in automation is the increased emphasis on flexibility and convertibility in the manufacturing process. Manufacturers are increasingly demanding the ability to easily switch from manufacturing Product A to manufacturing Product B without having to completely rebuild the production lines.
[edit] Safety issues of automation
One safety issue with automation is that while it is often viewed as a way to minimize human error in a system, increasing the degree and levels of automation also increases the
consequences of error. For example, The Three Mile Island nuclear event was largely due to over-reliance on "automated safety" systems. Unfortunately, in the event, the designers had never anticipated the actual failure mode which occurred, so both the "automated safety" systems and their human overseers were innundated with vast amounts of largely irrelevant information. With automation we have machines designed by (fallible) people with high levels of expertise, which operate at speeds well beyond human ability to react, being operated by people with relatively more limited education (or other failings, as in the Bhopal disaster or Chernobyl disaster). Ultimately, with increasing levels of automation over ever larger domains of activities, when something goes wrong the consequences rapidly approach the catastrophic. This is true for all complex systems however, and one of the major goals of safety engineering for nuclear reactors, for example, is to make safety mechanisms as simple and as foolproof as possible (see Safety engineering and passive safety). 