Industrial Wireless Equipment

Industrial Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are designed to operate over the same local area network range and have many of the same features, however, WLANs are more reliable. Certain protocols are implemented to make real-time communication failsafe and roaming can be 10 to 100 times faster than regular Wi-Fi. WLAN antennas and radios are designed specially to operate using WLANs and are capable of performing in remote and harsh environmental conditions.

WLAN antennas are devices that redirect energy they receive from a transmitter, providing more energy in one direction versus all other directions. Antennas can generally be classified as omnidirectional and directional. Omni antennas radiate and receive radio frequency (RF) energy equally in all horizontal directions. This broad coverage area increases the probability of maintaining connection stability, however the potential for interference and lower throughput is more likely. Yagi antennas radiate and receive RF energy in a selected direction, usually around 45 to 90 degrees. The signal from the target area is improved through directivity gain as long as there is no congestion. Interference is held to a minimum.

WLAN radios are industrial radios used for wireless transfer of data. Each model of radio has its own communication protocol which does not allow communication across brands. The three most common data radios are Serial, IO and Ethernet. Serial radios have one master radio that communicates with slave radios in the same network. Each network can have only one master radio that polls the slave radios one by one. Each slave radio has to wait for the master radio to poll it in order to send and receive data. For this reason, serial radios are a slower form of communication and could take several minutes to communicate. IO radios are designed to transmit and receive small amounts of data and allow various signal types to be wired directly into the radio. In most cases, wireless IO radios must be used in pairs, where one radio transmits the data and the other radio receives the data. Ethernet radios have an Access Point radio in a network that communicates to a number of remote radios. Each network has only one Access Point radio communicating to a number of remote radios sending and receiving data at any time without being polled. Data is sent in packets over several frequencies resulting in faster communication.