R70SR Serial Data Radio Overview, Binding, and Site Survey

Greg LaLiberte with Banner Engineering here to talk to you about the R70 Serial Radio or R70SR.

We're going to go through some radio setup, go through the different modes, and different times when you would utilize them, and then walk through a binding and site survey example with these.

The two different modes that are available on the R70s are serial mode and multihop mode.

Serial mode provides a nice, simple cable replacement, with very easy setup, to go between serial radios.

It does have a much faster setup time. However, when you do have, as you add more and more of these R70 radios on, response time can slow down.

So in cases where response time isn't critical, larger networks in serial mode are completely fine.

They also can be utilized with the Area Monitoring Gateway with SNAP ID, or the AMG kits.

Multihop mode is also available on these radios, and they allow for faster response time when you have larger radio networks.

The ability to test the signal quality with a site survey bind directly to a multihop DXM industrial controller.

Now when we're doing this, sensor IDs and radio IDs must start at 11 or higher.

And can these, when in multihop mode can be used with any multihop solution that's utilizing serial or modbus sensors.

In serial mode, looking at dips switch set up for the client radio, which is the one that would be located at the host to the controller, the only one that we're going to be turning on is the fourth dip switch, when we're talking from one client to one server.

If we're talking to many servers or repeaters, we are going to turn on that second dip switch there; so we'll be in an off, on, off, on setup for the client.

And for the servers, we're going to have all four dip switches off.

In multihop mode, we are going to set up the client, and the repeaters in the server is a little bit different because we're going to have that first dip switch always on.

For the client radio will be an on, off, off, on setup there, as seen in the picture.

For repeaters, we're going to be on, off, on, off.

And for servers, we are just going to have that first dip switch on.

This is a quick look at the binding procedure. But we're going to walk through all of those steps here in a video example, as well as going through how to site survey these when they are in multihop mode, which is required to do a site survey.

So this is a demonstration of binding, setting up the R70 serial radios.

This particular one I've already got power to it, can remove the cover.

It is set up for Client. So this will be the main one that all the other radios will bind to.

And then this particular one for this demonstration is set up in multihop mode.

It's going to be the same procedure whether you're in serial mode or multihop mode.

Take the cover off. You triple-click this button here, and you will start to see the LED rotating between green and red.

And we move this just a little bit off to the side. We take the server node, remove its cover, and we see that it's in multihop mode.

The rest being off means it is a server.

We then triple-click the button on this particular unit, and we'll see it alternate green, red, and then it will go solid; amber, green, red combined, blink four times; and now it is complete.

So now this device is bound to the client.

So we can take the cover, and we can place it back on top, and secure that on.

Okay, now we can take the client and we could continue binding in multiple other R70s at this point.

Or, we can take the client and be complete with this task.

And we can double-click that button, and it removes it out of binding mode.

The client will just go into blinking green.

You'll see the server will go solid red.

And what it's doing is this is forming into the network, and this will take about 20 seconds.

So it'll form into the network, and after the red it should go into a solid amber color, which it just did.

And then once it's complete with that, it will go to just a blinking green.

And now we are bound and in the system. As data would start to flow through, we'd be able to see that LED would blink very quickly for all of the modbus message requests coming through.

If it's ever blinking just a slow, solid red, that's an indication that it is out of sync.

But as long as it is blinking green, we're in sync with the client.

It might be a little bit hard to see. But it is blinking green and we are good to go, good to collect data.

Being that we're in multihop mode now, I'm going to transition over to a screen share of how we can do a site survey on these units using the multihop configuration software.

Now we're going to look at doing that site survey through the client R70.

I've got it plugged into the BWA-UCT-900 cable, and I'm utilizing the multihop configuration software by Banner.

Now that I've got it connected, I'll get that plugged into my laptop. I can go up here, go to Device Connection settings.

I'm going to pick 'Serial', and I'm going to choose the right Comm Port, and hit 'Connect'.

Now that I've connected, I can come in, I can hit 'Read'.

And what this is going to go out and do, is it’s going to read information from the client device, and also from the server device.

And if we were to look at the device address, that ID number that's on the outside of the R70s, it would match this device address right here.

This number is telling me that this device, its parent, is the same as the client.

If I had a repeater and the server was going through that repeater, you would see the number of the repeater here.

We'd have another device, and that repeater would be tied back to the master.

Now, if I want to do a site survey and I have multiple devices, I can click on this Site Survey and hit ‘Read’.

Or, if you want to do them one at a time, you can come down, right-click on the individual device and hit ‘Site Survey’.

Once you do that, it takes about 15 to 20 seconds.

It goes out and sends 100 packets out, and it determines on the way back how many that it received, and it breaks it out into a green, yellow, red and miss category.

You can see here that we had a very successful site survey 98 green, 2 misses.

The green is an indication of very, very good quality almost, you know, as if we were having a conversation, two people very close, talking very loudly to one another. They can hear each other extremely clearly.

Yellow, maybe a little further away. You're talking a little bit quieter, but still absolutely able to hear everything.

Red is almost like we're whispering. So we're on the border of being a missed packet.

You know, we're talking, I can hear, but, you know, any little bit of interference, those reds can turn into misses; the yellows can turn into reds.

So we really want to be as close to green, have the most greens as possible, and not too many misses.

We want to be, you know, best case scenario, above 80 greens, below 20 misses.

Now another way that we can do binding and site survey and data collection is by using the utilizing a DXM700, 1200, 1000, any multihop DXM.

So an R2- or an R4-type DXM. And this is actually pretty easy to do site survey with as well.

So you want to make sure that your server device is still in that multihop mode, which we are.

And then to do the binding, we go on the DXM screen, and we go to ISM radio, and we select 'Binding'.

Now when we go to bind it, to be able to do these individually, we can bind them all at once, but then we need to use the software if we want to actually do first site survey.

If we want to do this, the site survey through the screen, we need to bind it to a specific ID and that ID needs to be 11 or higher.

The 2 through 10 are for locally wired devices; 11 and up are for any wireless devices.

So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to bind this to start the binding at 11.

And then I'm going to move the DXM out of the way a little bit.

Remove the cover here, and then I'm going to do site survey, or sorry, I'm going to initiate the binding on the server, which is still in multihop mode, in the same way that it was done previously with the other client R70.

By just triple-clicking that button, we'll see I get the amber light that blinks four times.

As soon as that is done, I can then hit it the 'Back' button to get out of binding mode on the DXM.

And until I do that, the devices that you may have bound in wouldn't start trying to form into the network, as this one is doing now.

So if you wanted to go on to the next one, you would hit 'Back'.

You would increase that number to 12. Click 'Binding' to enter binding for that device.

But right now, this has now formed into the network and is now in sync with that DXM.

So now we could do a site survey on that DXM screen, and that will be the next step.

Now that we've moved the server device, the server radio a little bit further away, we can come back to the DXM.

And go to ISM Radio. This time, instead of 'Binding', we go 'Site Survey'.

Once we get in here, we pick that same ID that we just bound the device to, or whatever one you ultimately bound to.

If you've got multiple on here, you can do many of them through this screen one at a time.

And we hit 'Enter' on that. And now we will sit here and wait, and scan the same about 15 to 20 seconds, and then it'll report similar results to us on the green, yellow, red and miss.

And in this case we were able to get 100 green, zero yellows, zero red, and zero missed.

So that's how you can do, how you can utilize the R70SR in multihop mode to work with a multihop DXM, and connect up your systems in that way, as well as going directly between R70s.