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MISSION continuously strives
to increase the performance and reliability of the system
by taking advantage of new technologies. |
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ATLANTA, August 15, 2005 - The City of Tuscaloosa Alabama recently installed a large in-plant and
field SCADA system that covers four water and wastewater treatment plants and over 100 remote
pumping stations. Besides being a very large SCADA project, what makes this project unique is
it’s the first project in the country to mix cellular/web SCADA with traditional radio RTU to a
central HMI computer SCADA. By mixing the two SCADA technologies together the estimated costs of
the project were reduced by about 25%. “When using traditional radio and land lines, the estimates
from integrators and engineers was in the 6.0 to 6.5 million dollar range”, says Jimmy Junkin,
Director of the Tuscaloosa’s wastewater system. “After testing the cellular RTU’s at several
of our most challenging (and expensive) sites for over a year, we directed the project engineers
to re-estimate the project using the cellular RTU’s where applicable.”
The City and engineers chose to use cellular at the low to medium flow duplex pump stations,
supervisory monitoring water sites and the costliest to reach sites. “Frankly, we didn’t expect
the cellular based equipment to work very well. Some of our previous experiences with cellular
haven’t been that good,” says Bill Phillips, Senior I&C engineer with CH2M Hill in Gainesville, FL.
“After the successful testing, and considering the way it simplified numerous areas of the
project, we were much more comfortable designing the cellular into the system. We’re always
looking for new ways to save our customers money.”
Cellular based RTU’s were specified for 48 of the 117 remotes sites. Curry Controls of Lakeland,
Florida submitted the winning bid of just under 4.5 million dollars. “Though it was out of our
specific area of responsibility, we had questions about building this hybrid system. We had
just never done a project this way before. But we are pleasantly surprised with the ease of
integration and performance of the system,” says Milton Weaver, Tuscaloosa project Manager
for Curry Controls.
“MISSION now makes products from basic wireless dialers to streaming data RTU’s with sophisticated
yet simple software,” says John Collings, President of MISSION Communications. “SCADA system
data and graphs are available in the field; right on your web enabled cell phone. MISSION
now offers turnkey solutions for integrating our products and services into traditional SCADA
systems. We can guide engineering firms, integrators and customers through the process from
design to startup. The result is a high performance system that is simple to use and saves
hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.”
MISSION Communications is based in Atlanta, Georgia and provides turnkey monitoring and SCADA services
to the water and wastewater utility industry. MISSION was the first to introduce the wireless to
web concept to the water industry and is the acknowledged leader in the field.
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