Tips and Tricks: Get Active! Campbell Update 2nd Quarter 2013

I love springtime! The weather is warmer, the birds are chirping, the snow is melting. It makes me want to get on my walking shoes and get active. Your PakBus network also needs to be active and the Network Planner is just the place to set that up.

I hope you all have been taking advantage of this great tool. The Network Planner is a graphical PakBus network design tool. It automatically specifies the best hardware and software settings for your particular setup. You place stations and peripheral devices in your network. Then you specify links (which devices you want to talk to each other).

This is the Link tool:
Finally, you set up activities between stations. This is the Activity tool:
It is important to set up those activities because that is how the Network Planner decides on the specific settings to use.

Example 1: No Activity Setting In this example, we set up a simple network without specifying any activity:    The Network Planner then decided that 90 seconds would be an appropriate verify interval. That means that every 90 seconds or so the datalogger would initiate communication to verify that the communication path still existed, which uses more battery power and creates more signal traffic, eating up bandwidth.

Example 2: 60 min Activity Setting In this example we set up a one-hour scheduled collection activity: This gave the Network Planner better information to work with. So, it set the verify interval to a more appropriate 5,400 seconds (or 90 minutes). When our hourly scheduled collection is running smoothly, we don’t need to verify the communication paths. It is only if there is a problem and we go more than the 5,400 seconds without communicating that the datalogger would initiate a verification.

See this tip in action.

Remember, tell the Network Planner how much activity your network needs. Otherwise, you’ll end up doing wind sprints instead of taking a leisurely walk around the block.

Still sweatin’,