A low cost remote alarm for industrial power systems

The design and development of a remote alarm system suitable for use on industrial power systems are discussed. A prototype was tested in the laboratory with satisfactory performance. The proposed system consists of a remote monitoring unit and a control interface module directly plugged onto an IBM-compatible PC which acts as the control center. By adopting the touch-tone dialing technique, alarm data can be encoded, transmitted, and decoded without the need to use modems. The communication time for a fault reporting session, though slower than the SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system, is adequate for small industrial distribution networks