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An introduction to Monitoring Fundamentals strictly from the perspective of telecom network alarm management.
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Reserve Your Seat TodayWhile alarm monitoring is vital for you at many levels, it is never more so than with antenna towers lights. A tower light failure not only stops your daily actions but also increases your risk of heavy fines and liability. Installing a quality tower light monitoring solution is a good method of protecting your long-term profit.
The FCC dictates that tower lights must be monitored and that any light failures must be corrected within a matter of minutes.
Making a daily observation of tower lights by driving to all of your sites is primitive, expensive, and unreliable. The fuel and staffing expense for daily truck rolls to distant sites adds up very quickly. If your staff fails to perform their daily checks, outages may go unreported. Therefore, using the right telecom tower monitoring system for your tower lights cuts costs by shielding you from FCC fines.
The right monitoring device is installed at your cell tower sites and notifies your telecom operators of outages and any other problems that occur. It is also compact and reliable.
When it comes to maintaining your tower lights, you absolutely have to know when there's a problem - no matter where you are or the time of day. It's essential that your monitoring alerts can be received 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
A quality remote allows your tower operators to gain detailed info about your tower status wherever you are by sending alerts to your cell phone or email.
Monitoring is most crucial when there is a power failure at your site. Having a remote with an uninterruptible power source (UPS) allows your monitoring to remain online, even when the power is out.
The word "uninterruptible" means that the power supply will activate quickly enough to prevent the gear from ever losing power when the main power source goes dark. This means that a UPS system must be capable of activating backup power within 25ms of a power loss.
While the FCC requires tower managers to alert the FAA within 30 minutes of a tower light failure, the tower light monitoring system allows you the ability to alert them within 30 seconds.
Text messages come straight to your phone, but you need to keep in mind (especially if you get multiple text messages every day) that it's relatively easy to miss a message or assume that it's a simple text from a relative or something else that isn't critical.
Tower owners need a monitoring system to avoid FCC tower fines, but you cannot simply pick one at random. If you do, you will almost certainly end up with one that is too small or one with greater capacity than you will ever use.
The following tower monitoring solutions offer three advantages: cost-benefit, a compact form factor, and high reliability.
The NetGuardian 216 is a smaller RTU that provides exactly the right capacity to manage your small and medium sites and reports alarms using SNMP or DCP over your existing IP network.
The NetDog G2 is perfect for smaller remote sites that require constant monitoring. The NetDog provides dial-up alarm reporting, LAN, and a web browser interface. It also provides 2 analog inputs and allows for easy wiring with screw-down connectors.
Don't let tower light failures expose you to liability. Install a reliable automatic tower light monitor at all your tower sites for a long-term remote alarm monitoring and control solution.
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