A Shire council approached us for a road closure warning system as part of a flood mitigation plan.
Extreme rainfall is becoming more frequent and it causes disruptive road flooding and public safety concerns.
A system was needed to activate four LED warning signs when the road flooded.
Council required the remote control and monitoring of the LED flood warning signs, which are to be operated from a high level sensor in a local creek.
An efficient, low power radio communication system was needed, together with the ability to send SMS text alerts to staff phones.
After reviewing the Shire council’s requirements, we specified a QTech Multi Point Controller and a 4G SMS Lite as the ideal solution.
To help achieve efficient radio communications, we suggested moving the proposed Master site. The Master was moved to a higher site, which provided good line of sight to all warning signs, as its elevation was over 75m.
The Master is a Multi Point Controller (PD8620) which communicates to four slave radio modules. The slave radios are Wireless Point to Point (WP2P) – Digital radios (PD8810-WP2PE).
Signs A & Sign B only require one radio as they are close to each another.
A WP2P radio was installed at Sign C, Sign D, and the level sensor site.
At the Master a 4G SMS Lite (PD8640-4G) was used to provide cellular communication of any warning activation. Part of the completed installation is below:
Antennas are always an important consideration to achieve reliable communications.
A high gain Collinear antenna (PD9242) is to be installed at the Master and directional Yagi’s (PD9225) at each of the radios.
To ensure good cellular communication the SMS Lite was also specified a high gain collinear (COL7195).
Reception of each point back to the Master was tested and achieved successfully.
There are many types of water level sensors available, including float, ultrasonic and tilt switches. Our wireless road closure warning system simply requires a volt free, contact closure to be wired into the digital input of the WP2P radio module.
In this application, all the WP2P radio modules also have spare inputs and outputs, which could be used for future expansion or system changes. The MPC supports up to eight slave WP2P modules so more could be added.
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