Remote Monitoring for Government & Critical Infrastructure

Supplied and installed. Sentor systems are in service with the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, North Las Vegas Police, the City of Corona in California, the US Forest Service, Telstra, Transgrid, NSW Police, the Country Fire Authority, the Sydney Cricket Ground and Sydney Football Stadium, and a number of county, city and shire governments in the United States and Australia, along with classified US Government installations we do not describe. Contact us for references relevant to your own application.

The controller keeps a history log on site, with a date and time against each record. It is a general record rather than an access-only one — alarm events, power failures, entries and anything else configured as worth recording — so an event is read in context alongside whatever else the site was doing at the time. The log size is user definable; a controller running standalone holds around 500 entries, and up to 1,000 are retained across two rotating log files when it is connected to a PC, with the oldest overwritten after that. Because it is written at the site, a site that spent the night out of contact still produces a complete record of the night.

Usually, yes — and it is worth being precise about how, because the detail decides whether it works. The controller does not speak DNP3 natively. DNP3 is provided by a software interface that runs alongside the Sentor workstation and presents the site’s alarm and status points to your master as a DNP3 Level 1 slave, answering Class 0, 1, 2 and 3 scans along with time and date synchronisation. Station address, point and index values, object and variation types and unsolicited reporting are all configurable, in the way your SCADA staff would expect to configure any other slave device. It was built this way for a state electricity transmission operator reporting into an ABB SCADA network. SNMP v1, v2 and v3 are used where sites report into network-management platforms instead. Send us the points list and the master you run, and we will confirm it against your system before you write anything into a specification.

It keeps working. The scenario logic that decides what to do about a high temperature, a generator that has not started or a door opened outside hours runs on the controller itself, not on a server somewhere else, so a communications failure costs you visibility rather than control. Events continue to be logged locally and are available when the link returns.

Sentor has been building this product line continuously since 1995, and compatibility across the range has been maintained deliberately rather than incidentally — which is the practical answer to a twenty-year asset question. Equipment is supplied and supported in the United States by Sentor Control Systems Inc. in San Diego, California, and in Australia by Radio Industries Australia Pty. Limited as authorised distributor. For a written statement of support terms to attach to a tender, ask us and we will provide one.