December 2015 – December 2015
There is so much data available from equipment these days and the business wanted access to it, as quick as possible! We were in need of collecting data underground and potentially in the future giving staff access to data while underground.
The IP addressing scheme had to be slightly re-organised to accommodate the new underground devices. Equipment selection was next, we have had great experience with Mikrotik network gear in harsh environments so that was chosen, I configured all the gear in Perth and sent it off to site (and of course wrote my pre-deployment plan and network diagram). Placement of the radios had been pre-determined by site staff in order to capture the equipment regularly and a new cabinet had to be fabricated to house one of the switches and POE injectors to run the radios. Bandwidth at this stage is not the main concern, what we really need is for the RF to be as disperse as possible so radios running at 2.4ghz was chosen. A few other little RF tweaks were made to get the best results.
The installation took a couple of days due to the nature of being underground, waiting on various other teams and priorities. I was helped with the installation by a communications contractor who for the most part did the fitting of the cabinet and equipment, the on site electricians who ran conduit and cable and other underground staff that moved and drove equipment for us which was very much appreciated.
After the installation was complete, our data collection for some specific equipment had moved from once a week to up to 30 times per shift.It was a great project with a terrific outcome and I can’t wait to get this put in at some of our other sites.
