I have a number of VW instruments on a remote site. 12 instrument nests with some of them have more than 16 instruments. The goal is to bring them online. My current plan is:
VWs -> AM16/32B -> AVW206 -> CR1000 -> (CELLULAR MODULE TO BRING CR1000 ONLINE).
Since one AVW206 can only handle two AM16/32B and one CR1000 can handle 4 AVW206. I will probably end up with 4 CR1000 with 4 cell lines.
My first question is that if I can bring everything together use one cell line.
The second question is that how good is the radio communication between AVW206 and CR1000. I don’t have a visual line-of-sight between any of these nests and the distances between the nests are around 500’-1000’.
The third question is what equipment from Campbell I can use to bring the CR1000 online (NL100?).
Thank you all so much for read this and any inputs would be greatly appreciated.
I've done pretty much the same thing thing with good results.
I have one field site with a dozen or so CR1000's, AVW200's along with some AVW206's. I used RF401 radios between all stations and a raven cellular modem to transmit the data to the web, everything worked perfectly. Several of my AVW206's did not have line of site at distances of 1000 feet and maintained solid contact with other CR1000's on site. I used a combination of Yagi and omni directional antenna's.
Bringing it all back to one station and reducing your costs by using one cell line is a good idea, it will just require some reprogramming of the base station.
Best to do some desktop analysis of your radio paths first, before committing to outlaying some dollars for parts.
I'm not sure I understand the bringing the cr1000 online part, are you talking about a unit back at the office, or the CR1000 out in the field?
I have 20 nets of instrument with VW piezometers. each net have 2 to 8 piezometers spreading around 2 squar kilometer. I want to connect the Piezometers with AVW206 , multiplexers , than use RF401 between AVW206 and a raven cellular to download data from web.
My question is how to write CR 800 progarm to read all instrument in 20 nets at hourly interval?
At a high level, it seems like you would connect both the Raven and the RF401 to your CR800. Then you would have an AVW206 for each "net". When the net is measuring more than two channels (more than two VW piezometers), you will need to use a multiplexer (AM16/32B) with the AVW206.
You can either configure and set up this network manually, ensuring that each AVW206 has a unique pakbus address, or you can use the Network Planner to set this up and it will assign the pakbus addresses for you. Either way, you will know the pakbus address of each AVW206 before you write your CRBasic Program.
In the CRBasic Program, use the AVW200 instruction for each AVW206 device, and specify its pakbus address as one of the arguments. You will also need to specify your multiplexer setup and reps based on how that net is set up. You need to allow 2 seconds for each sensor (potentially 16-20 seconds per AVW206). However, since you are measuring hourly, there should be plenty of time in your scan and you can put the AVW200 instructions back to back in the program.
Check the CRBasic Help for the AVW200 instruction for more details.
* Last updated by: GTProdMgr on 6/4/2012 @ 11:11 AM *