Wireless Broadband to remote PACs

[Phil Duncan]

Greetings all,

I was once told "The quickest way to get an engineer to do something for you is to tell them that it can't be done."

True to form I am trying to achieve what I have been told is not possible. My goal is to implement several remote stations (PACs) controlling some equipment and be able to access these PACs over a wireless broadband connection via the internet.

The remote sites are just that, they would be scattered over hundreds of kilometres (miles) from each other and a central monitoring station. I spoke with a representative from Australia's largest telco who supply modems and cards to access their "Next G" wireless broadband network (HSDPA). I was informed that the minimum requirements for a any card (USB or PCMCIA) that connects to the wireless broadband network is a windows O/S. Compact fieldpoint units run a real-time operating system, so unless some very smart person has already developed labview drivers for these cards that can be included in a real-time application on a PAC I have reached a large high brick wall. :headbang:

Another issue is that the remote sites will obtain a dynammically assigned IP address upon connection to the network, meaning the central monitoring station will have a number of moving targets to try and communicate with.

So my question to you all is can one set up a remote PAC and connect to it via a wireless braodband internet connection?

Has anyone done anything similar to this?

Cheers & Beers

:thumbup: :beer:

[Tomi Maila]

Yes, wireless remote control is possible. The easiest way to your goal is to by a special machine-to-machine modem that can interface what ever system you have. Search google for "machine to machine" or for "M2M". Alternatively you can simply buy a phone a phone and connect it to your hardware. After configuring the data accounts to the phone, most phones can listen to AT modem commands so they can be controlled with AT commands and there is no need for special driver software.

However with a phone things normally get a bit trickier than with a good M2M modem. Depending on your operator and your subscription type there may be certain issues realted to the network that you may not know. My local operator has a special M2M subscription but I don't know if yours does. The issues are

• only wireless device cann initiate the connection
  
• there normally is a firewall in the operator network that prevents connections from outside
  
• the firewall does port and address translations
  
• connection is not always open even though it seems to be open so you have to test the connection functionality somehow every once in a while
  

Before I go on writing ten pages of instructions on how to manage these issues, perhaps you can tell a little more what your communications would be like and please check the M2M modem providers if they have already a solution that can do everything you want. Also call your operator and ask if they have M2M subscriptions, if they have firewalled their network from outside, if their network supports initiating connections from outside (I doubt), if they do have NAT at the edge of the wireless network and so on...

Tomi

[bbean]

QUOTE(Phil Duncan @ Mar 21 2007, 01:29 AM)

Greetings all,

The remote sites are just that, they would be scattered over hundreds of kilometres (miles) from each other and a central monitoring station. I spoke with a representative from Australia's largest telco who supply modems and cards to access their "Next G" wireless broadband network (HSDPA). I was informed that the minimum requirements for a any card (USB or PCMCIA) that connects to the wireless broadband network is a windows O/S. Compact fieldpoint units run a real-time operating system, so unless some very smart person has already developed labview drivers for these cards that can be included in a real-time application on a PAC I have reached a large high brick wall. :headbang:

Cheers & Beers

:thumbup: :beer:

How bout this:

3G – UMTS/HSDPA Tri Band Cellular Router

http://www.kapp.com.au/products/radiotelemetry.asp

Also, this company has done wireless broadband with GSM and Compact RIO modules.

http://www.sea-gmbh.com/en/crio/cr1_index_e.php?page=inhalt

maybe they could provide insight.

I don't know if you are locked into the "Next G" wireless network, but it seems like there are a lot of products out there for Ethernet to GSM Gateways

[Phil Duncan]

Thank you both for your input. I will do some more research and see if I can do "the impossible".

Watch this space.

[jbrohan]

I'm interested in processing emails in LV, actually emails with attached .wav files. It seems fairly reliable to read the emails in php on a web server and to download the text in LV. It's fairly trivial to send emails from LV. It's actually a lot more reliable to call a php program with a set of parameters than to use the Send Email. This approach gets around al the IP address issues and uses a regular email address.

I poll the read-email function every one minute and send one or two emails in response. Emails to cell phones work fine, some providers support jpeg attachments.

Yours Sincerely

John

[kappeng]

Hi guys, just came and signed up here as we got a few clicks to our website from this forum because of the above link to our 3G/HSDPA Router.

bbean thank you for recommending one of our products!

Phil, to asnwer your questions on the application which you have described, the UMTS Router that we have should do the job fine for you as long as your PAC's have Ethernet Capability (I know they do as I have attended quite a few NI Presentations here in Perth). Bascially you just hook up your PAC's to one each of these NextG Routers, you dont need to worry about PCMCIA Cards / Drivers and other mumbo Jumbo as this router takes 10 mins to set up and works in similar fashion to an ADSL Router.

BAsically, you can let the NextG Router manage your connection and you can bring all of these sites back to a central location which can either be a Windoze Box or a Cisco PPTP Capable Router. That way you have all your sites as if they were all hooked up on your local network and the Telstra NextG Links become entirely transparent!.

We can help with the integration for and supply hardware as required. Please feel free to send us an email via our website at http://www.kapp.com.au