Special Topics

Week 1: Survey of Features

Week 2: Hardware Instrumentation

Week 3: Web Portal I—Unit Setup Options, Notification Setup Options, Alarm Groups, Website Tools

Week 4: Web Portal II—Advanced Features, Reporting, Supergraph, Volumetric Flow

Week 1: Survey of Functions

Week 2: Hardware and Instrumentation

Week 3: Web Portal I—Unit Setup Options, Notification Setup Options, Alarm Groups, Website Tools

Week 4: Web Portal II—Advanced Features, Reporting, Supergraph, Volumetric Flow

Week 1: Survey of Features

“Out in the middle of nowhere, no one hears your alarm,” Danny Farine, Water Services Superintendent in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, says. He recalls the old system of reporting and dispatching his technicians to an overflow incident.

The trial was Eddie Stewart’s idea, Midwest Regional Sales Manager for Mission Communications. He recommended Siloam Springs install the MyDro remote terminal unit (RTU) and monitor at one of its problematic sites for 30 days, a risk-free demonstration unit. If Siloam Springs could see its value in that first month, then they would buy it and sign up for service.

Christiansen remembers seeing an immediate impact. “We started watching the reports immediately. We installed it on a Thursday, came back on a Monday, and we told them that the station’s Pump 1 was running more than Pump 2.” The team investigated the site, pulled the pump, and found a problem. “Pump 2 was clogged,” he says.

The MyDro RTU paid for itself in the first week. “Total install of the MyDro was a couple thousand bucks, but it saved them a $10,000 pump loader.” That was just in potential equipment damage, since a clogged pump can quickly cause an overflow and add cleanup and containment efforts. Avoiding incidents like that is one of the many benefits of the Mission system and its reporting. “They were really impressed,” Christiansen says.

Farine’s department quickly reconciled the monthly fee and installed more MyDro RTUs, starting with the troubled sites first. Now all of their lift stations have been fitted with monitoring systems and Farine’s crew can use their resources better. There are even plans for new stations to keep pace with the growth. “All new stations will have Mission devices on day one.”

There are still issues; every station, in every system, in every town has them. But Farine says that since using the Mission devices, the jobs are smaller. “It gets us out there to take care of the equipment.” The depleted staff can focus on being more proactive with their maintenance. He explains, “Our biggest benefit right now is we’re doing so much work like fixing water leaks. We’re just constantly doing something and if we don’t have to pull off those jobs to go lift a lid at a pump station to look at it, then it saves us time doing everything else. And that’s its biggest benefit right now. It lets us stay concentrated on all the other stuff we have going.”

What was once a reliance on an observant neighbor starting a series of phone calls is now an automatic alarm directly sent to the Siloam Springs Wastewater Technician’s phone. They are able to use reports like the Daily Runtime Report to identify potential site issues, so that maintenance schedules can be customized. But the key element is avoiding overflows. Farine explains, “Relying on flashy lights to avoid system failure just won’t work. You need a remote monitoring system like the Mission system. We use it. We enjoy it. It’s helped us a tremendous amount.” To learn how the MyDro system can help your utility, contact sales@123mc.com or visit our website at 123mc.com.

The third generation (3G) of wireless cellular over-the-air protocol debuted in May of 2001. If you had a child born then they’d already be off to college and it’d be time to re-purpose that bedroom. That’s exactly what’s happening with the cellular carriers in the United States right now. All have announced that they are retiring that base station equipment this year, so that the frequency spectrum it occupies can be used more efficiently by the newer protocols.

Mission has incorporated cellular modules that operate on the latest protocols for several years now, but we did still have thousands of legacy radios that will be unable to communicate with their towers after the shutdown. Over two years ago we began to prepare for the sunset by purchasing sufficient stock of new radios to replace the older ones.

While the pandemic has thrown sand into the gears of everyday life for everyone, we were able to get the vast majority of radios into the hands of our customers before the scheduled sunset. At its peak our 3G warroom showed customers installing up to 500 new radios per day. The vast majority of those went without incident or a phone call to the office.

Clayton Balassi’s team at Beaufort-Jasper Water & Sewer Authority in South Carolina converted 357 radios, that is 77% of their Mission devices, before the sunset date. Balassi said, “We found out about the AT&T 3G Sunset deadline primarily from Mission Technical Support over the phone and constant reminders on the 123SCADA website. We have all of our sites organized in a checklist order to make our monthly routes efficient. We reorganized the radio upgrades in this sequence to minimize drive time.”

The Autoswapper all but eliminated the Beaufort-Jasper team’s need to involve Technical Support. Balassi added, “We called them, maybe, once every 20 sites. Without it we would have been extremely frustrated and we may still be working on this project. Bless the team that created Autoswapper.”

Some had issues though, and they can be broadly categorized into three areas:

Cellular wireless carriers operate on numerous frequency bands typically ranging from 700 MHz to 2.1 GHz, but now even higher with the newest 5GHz bands supporting 5G. Lower frequencies are more forgiving for non-line-of-sight installations. As the frequencies get higher, it’s more important to have fewer obstacles in the radio path. In urban areas cell towers may be inconspicuously located on corners of buildings, but in rural areas they tend to be mounted on 200-foot towers. As carriers rejigger the frequency spectrum they will continue making many changes to optimize their new networks.

Traditionally our radios have sent in telemetry from the radio indicating signal strength or power (“RSRP”), and the newer radios do this as well. But the new protocols also use sequential and block-error data coding techniques to measure signal quality (“RSRQ”). This number tells us the difference between a really strong signal (that the radio is having a hard time decoding because of a nearby interferer) compared to a really weak signal (that it can decode just fine because there's not much background noise). So while both the old and new parameters are generally highly correlated, interesting combinations of “bad/good” and “good/bad” can inform the user of where to troubleshoot problems.

Across the country in Oregon, Rogue Valley Sewer Service’s TJ Weber swapped out every antenna on his own. He said, “The radios were an easy swap. Even swapping the MyDros was easy. For the radios it was removing the four screws and then the little screws on the board. Then pop that radio off, pop the new radio in. Then change out the antenna.”

Antenna optimization will improve signal strength and will likely result in a more reliable connection. Locate the antenna high, outside, and away from metal structures (buildings, control cabinets, signs, etc.). The new radio may be relying on different frequency bands than the old one, and an antenna that performed well with the old band may not perform as well in the new environment. If your Mission RTU has been installed for many years a new antenna cable and whip may help.

Other issues may have little to do with the new radio. A connection pattern like this can indicate a power problem. For example, the battery of a solar powered RTU no longer has the storage capacity to last the night.

For more information, contact Mission Communications Technical Support at techsupport@123mc.com or by dialing 877-993-1911, option 2.

With private citizens funding and developing space exploration missions, it seems that humans are on the cusp of creating extraterrestrial colonies. The mission of SpaceX—Elon Musk’s private spaceflight organization—is to cultivate life on other planets, starting with Mars. There are a plethora of logistical, technological, physiological factors to consider before human life can sustain itself away from Mother Earth. One such concern is the availability of water in space.

Currently, the water humans use in space has to be transported from Earth and recycled. The majority of water on the International Space Station (up to 80%) is recycled from the astronauts’ sweat, exhalations, and other waste, but this system still requires regular filter changes and refills.

For more than 30 years, the European Space Agency and partner universities have been working to develop a self-sustained ecosystem in a box for astronauts to take with them to explore the Solar System. The system uses a chain of filters to endlessly recycle waste such as urine and sweat. Bacteria in bioreactors and chemical reactions produce clean water and food. With a completely self-sufficient system, astronauts can travel through deep space forever producing the three basic elements of life: water, oxygen, and food.

The alternative option is to identify an existing body of water in space for humans to harvest. Mars already has such sources of water and so does Earth’s moon. Water was found even on a large quasar, 12 billion light years away. And those are just a few examples. Most recently, the first real-time discovery of ice on the moon was made by China’s Chang’e 5 lunar lander in December of 2021. This excites anyone interested in the development of interstellar travel, as water is a dense, heavy substance, and there are limitations on the amount of it that can be transported in a spacecraft.

NASA expects to initiate a rover mission—Viper—in 2023 to map resources and lunar ice deposits around the moon’s South Pole. With adequate funding from Congress, the agency plans to land humans on the lunar South Pole in 2025 to explore mining discovered resources.

Humans can use lunar ice for more than just drinking and growing crops. They can potentially convert it into hydrogen or oxygen fuel. Even 3D printers can use extracted minerals to enable manufacturing in space, using native materials. Advancements made in technology for space exploration stand to benefit life on Earth—as was the case with portable vacuum cleaners, cardiac pumps, and embedded web technology that provided the basis for the Internet of Things.