With the majority of companies in the oil, gas, railroad, water, wastewater, mining and power/utilities industries requiring wide area distributed radio networks for communications, engineers in charge of these radio networks have the daunting task of maintaining the highest level of performance and uptime at all times.
Given that you're reading this, I will choose to make the assumption that you are either an engineer in charge of such a radio network or that you've had some interaction on some level with such a radio network and it may not have been an altogether pleasant experience.
We're going to discuss a few things to keep in mind if you're interested in getting the most uptime possible out of your serial radios (and, let's face it, why wouldn't you want that).
1. Many serial radios provide diagnostics indicating the operating state of the radio.
If your serial radios happen to support such diagnostics, there is a wealth of useful information potentially at your fingertips, if you can just determine how to access it. Ironically, many radio manufacturers keep such data "behind lock-and-key" by only giving you access through one of their own tools. At least, that may be the only commonly known way out of the box.
However, where there is a will there is a way. Whether it be via a custom-coded software solution or easily configurable off-the-shelf software solutions, access to the diagnostics in your serial radio doesn't have to require a limited proprietary tool.
And, once you have access to the diagnostics data...
2. Having a historical sequence of events for some radio stats can help pinpoint why an issue occurred or indicate that an issue is likely to occur.
...there is so much you can do to make your life easier in maintaining your radios. For instance, logging and trending radio statistics over time such as received signal strength, battery voltage and case temperature can expose a pattern pointing to specific conditions that caused the radio to fail.
Identifying such patterns can be beneficial in other ways, as well, since you can then watch for the same pattern in the future and identify the potential for failure before it even happens.
So, you've discovered such a pattern in your radio's operational history...
3. Knowing why a radio went offline speeds troubleshooting and greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to get the radio operational again.
...now you have to fix the problem and get your radio back online.
Let's go back to the beginning of this post - how much information did you have about the issue with your radio before you had to make the potentially long drive out to your radio site to try to resolve the situation?
At least some of you have to be saying "None" or at least "Not a lot". How much time and effort would it have saved you if you had arrived at the radio site knowing exactly what the issue was and how to fix it immediately?
So you're probably saying to yourself or possibly to your phone, tablet or possibly your PC, "Okay, that's all great from a hypothetical standpoint. But how can I actually do anything with this and apply it to my own radio network?"
