many_methods
New Member
Hi,
This is likely to be my first and last thread on this forum. This is a cry for help as I'm currently at a loss as to how to proceed with this issue. I've no experience with radio comms and I'm struggling to get a satisfactory solution from our supplier so here I am asking for help! Anyway, enough of the sob story and on to the problem:
I work in the education sector and at one of our sites we have a number of electricity meters which send data wirelessly (via radio transmission @ 153.1MHz) from each of the main buildings to a central hub located in the centre of the site. We had been successfully receiving data daily from all of these meters for at least 2 years. Then, one day in October last year, all of the data suddenly stopped being recorded by the hub. Naturally we assumed the hub was faulty as this is the common point of failure and so it was replaced but to no avail. We have since found that there is some background interference at around 153.085Mhz that appears to be preventing our metering equipment from operating. From the graphs produced it is clear that the interference is constant - it does not pulse, it does not drop, it just exists permanently. I do have some video showing the signal - if it is likely to be of use please let me know and I'll be happy to upload it.
There are approximately 7 buildings on site, each with their own buildings services; intruder systems, fire alarms, CCTV, etc. Therefore turning each item off in turn to try to isolate the root cause of the problem is likely to take some time and cause some disruption to building users with no guarantee of success.
I'm therefore not entirely sure what approach I should take to make progress with this. Ideally I need some kind of device that can accurately pinpoint the direction and strength of the signal if such a thing exists. This might at least enable us to identify if the interference is from one of our buildings, or from source off-site. At the moment we've been relying on a walkie-talkie to determine the signal strength so not exactly revolutionary equipment! Since then we've installed a piece of software on a laptop that shows the frequency range but again, this does not give us any idea of the signal strength or direction.
If anyone has any suggestions for how we could look to resolve this problem, or to suggest some equipment that we could either hire/borrow/purchase then I would be very interested to hear from you.
Thanks in advance.
Rob
This is likely to be my first and last thread on this forum. This is a cry for help as I'm currently at a loss as to how to proceed with this issue. I've no experience with radio comms and I'm struggling to get a satisfactory solution from our supplier so here I am asking for help! Anyway, enough of the sob story and on to the problem:
I work in the education sector and at one of our sites we have a number of electricity meters which send data wirelessly (via radio transmission @ 153.1MHz) from each of the main buildings to a central hub located in the centre of the site. We had been successfully receiving data daily from all of these meters for at least 2 years. Then, one day in October last year, all of the data suddenly stopped being recorded by the hub. Naturally we assumed the hub was faulty as this is the common point of failure and so it was replaced but to no avail. We have since found that there is some background interference at around 153.085Mhz that appears to be preventing our metering equipment from operating. From the graphs produced it is clear that the interference is constant - it does not pulse, it does not drop, it just exists permanently. I do have some video showing the signal - if it is likely to be of use please let me know and I'll be happy to upload it.
There are approximately 7 buildings on site, each with their own buildings services; intruder systems, fire alarms, CCTV, etc. Therefore turning each item off in turn to try to isolate the root cause of the problem is likely to take some time and cause some disruption to building users with no guarantee of success.
I'm therefore not entirely sure what approach I should take to make progress with this. Ideally I need some kind of device that can accurately pinpoint the direction and strength of the signal if such a thing exists. This might at least enable us to identify if the interference is from one of our buildings, or from source off-site. At the moment we've been relying on a walkie-talkie to determine the signal strength so not exactly revolutionary equipment! Since then we've installed a piece of software on a laptop that shows the frequency range but again, this does not give us any idea of the signal strength or direction.
If anyone has any suggestions for how we could look to resolve this problem, or to suggest some equipment that we could either hire/borrow/purchase then I would be very interested to hear from you.
Thanks in advance.
Rob