Industry Talking As the summer heat leaves us it is time to focus on the coming year, with all the opportunities and challenges this will bring. During February we held our annual planning day in Melbourne with the committee discussing detailed plans for 2016. I am pleased to report that 2016 will see a program further expanded to provide even more value for all supporters. Firstly we welcome Geoff Spring to the executive of the association to assist with policy work. Geoff has long experience with critical communications and I am looking forward to working with him on all facets of the association. We continue to work with WestwickFarrow and Comms Connect to bring content, subject matter experts and training subjects to our industry events around Australia. These events worked well in 2015 and we want to give our members more reason to invest their time in them. Many members need to travel long distances to the major centres and we must provide good reason to do so. ARCIA will also be producing best practice white papers on subjects that we believe are need to educate the market. The most recently released paper is on IECEx Intrinsic Safety standards and why they matter, but, more importantly, how to recognise where they are appropriate. This white paper is available on our website, www.arcia.org.au/intrinsicsafety. Further papers are under development on the operations of UHF CB radios and radio site management and installation guidelines. ARCIA will also be improving how we communicate to industry members and users via website improvements and social media. I would encourage all of our readers to seek out ARCIA on Twitter to keep up to date about what the association is doing. Looking forward to seeing you around Australia during 2016
DMR solution Simoco has launched Pulse, a portfolio of products including integrated RTU, data modems and gateway for the electricity, water and gas sectors, which enable operators to manage and control smart grids and networks across large operational areas. Pulse allows SCADA telemetry applications to be quickly deployed over DMR Tier III trunked networks to deliver reliable communications, including voice. The solution, which uses a fully integrated IP network to connect information sent from data modems or RTUs to SCADA masters, is designed to be effective in remote areas where cellular coverage is intermittent and installing wired networks is costly. The portfolio consists of the Pulse AIR and AIR Pro data modems, suitable for organisations that already have RTUs either integrated into their equipment or have existing RTUs deployed over unreliable unlicensed channels, or public networks such as 3G or GPRS. Also included in the portfolio is the Pulse ELITE Integrated RTU for in-field deployments, which features digital and analog outputs for the collection of data and status information from plant equipment such as actuators, meters, switchgear and programmable logic controllers. The gateway products also enable SCADA to seamlessly interface with the digital radio infrastructure. This makes the radio infrastructure transparent to the SCADA application and requires no customisation or integration in order to deploy SCADA over radio. Systems can either be fully deployed over PMR or can be used to form part of mixed technology telemetry solutions. Simoco Australasia Pty Ltd www.simocogroup.com
Hamish Duff, President Australian Radio Communications Industry Association
30 This issue is sponsored by — ROHDE & SCHWARZ (AUSTRALIA) PTY LTD — http:/www.rohde-schwarz.com.au
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