As anyone tried to use BGAN (Broadband Global Area Network) Explorer 110 connected with a NL100 to retrieve data from a remote datalogger?
I mean the following:
Datalogger <--> NL100 <--> BGAN Explorer 110 (Provides IP address) <--> WAN/LAN <--> LoggerNet Terminal
* Last updated by: sergio on 4/8/2009 @ 10:36 AM *
The NL100 does not support the DHCP protocol and can therefore not be configured by your router. If your datalogger is a CR1000 or CR3000, the NL120 or NL115 devices can plug directly on the logger expansion and should be able to work with your gateway.
Thanks for the reply,
We have a CR1000 and we could get a NL120. The question is how do we retrieve the IP number that has been assigned to the Logger by the BGAN-gateway, when the Logger is a remote location? We read that the CR1000 is capable of sending an email. Can this feature be used to send the currently assigned IP Address to our office?
Our basic question is how do we know the IP address that has to be configured into loggernet in order for it to retrieve data from the remote logger - this gets complicated when one considers that the IP is constantly changing.
Cheers
I'd splice in a small router with DDNS capabilities so you could always find mydatalogger.dyndns.org (or whatever), and then the CR1000/NL100 could have a static IP on the LAN side (and be in the DMZ or have ports forwarded as applicable).
If the BGAN gateway is acting as an IP gateway, the address that it assigns to the CR1000 will be irrelevant because it will likely be a "local" address, such as 192.168.11.1, which is not routable across the internet. The address that will be of interest will be that of the gateway itself. This makes the rather bold, and likely unwarranted, assumption that Inmarsat is not itself using private addresses on its network. If this assumption proves incorrect, than your only choice is to have the datalogger make an outgoing PakBus/TCP connection to your computer.
Thanks for the input provided.
I spoke with IT and from that talk another idea came up...
Given that the CR1000 can act as an FTP client, then it should be possible for the CR1000 to FTP the data files collected to a DMZ server. That way the CR1000 initiates the session and the NL120 gets the IP port used to communicate from the BGAN. That way I do not have to bother with finding out what is the current IP assigned to the Logger.
Afterwards I can have loggernet retrieve the data files from my institution's DMZ server.
Could you comment?
Thanks,
Sergio
Afterwards I can have loggernet retrieve the data files from my institution's DMZ server.
The LoggerNet server stores its files in a binary data cache. There would be no way to ingest these ASCII files into the cache. However, if you are willing to work with the data files as they are (perhaps using some other analysis package or RTMC Pro, which can read *.dat files), then this approach would be fine.
Dana W