Bullhorn RM5 Installation Best Practices

Have you recently purchased a Bullhorn RM510c or RM510s unit and planning on installing it soon? Join Michael Plaster, our Remote Monitoring Specialist with over 25 years of experience with remote monitoring units, for some best practices for installing your new RM510c/s rectifier remote monitoring units and answers to your frequently asked questions.

Speakers

Michael Plaster, Remote Monitoring Specialist

Transcript

Introduction

Mike
All right, then — good morning, everybody. As Vince said, I’ve been here for 25 years, working with remote monitors — I’ve been supporting them, installing them, and I’ve seen just about every scenario out there. At least I’d like to say I’ve seen every scenario, but it seems like there’s one or two that stump me every now and then — but we keep working at it.

Today we’re going to talk about the RM5 — some of the best practices — and we’re going to start out talking about dome placement, wiring, our power for our relay and power supply, and Bullhorn Tools.

Cell and Satellite Placement

We’re going to start out with the cell and satellite placement. When you’re setting these up, you’re looking for a signal of two to five for the satellite, and anywhere from zero to negative 120 on the cell. As you get closer to zero on the cell, that’s your better signal — as you get closer to negative 120, you’re starting to get to the point where you’re not going to have any signal and won’t be able to transmit. So if you’re somewhere between 0 and negative 120, you’re pretty good there. On the satellite, you definitely want to be in that two-to-five range.

When you’re placing these domes out there, the satellite has to have a clear view of the sky in one direction or the other. In the past, with our previous units, they had to be on the south side of any building — on this one, it can be north, south, east, or west. Satellites are always moving in one direction or the other, so you’ll get service as long as you’ve got a clear view of the sky.

Now, with the cell unit, you have to have AT&T coverage. When you’re out there placing the dome, we can tell you what AT&T tells us for coverage there — but if you remember that commercial, “Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?” — it’s similar to that. Moving it a couple feet in one direction or the other can make a difference. If you don’t have any signal, you don’t have any signal — but if you’ve got a weak signal, just shifting it a little bit can make a big difference. I’ve seen moving it three inches increase signal to the point of going from not being able to transmit to transmitting without any problems.

Basic Components

Now, our basic components are the dome, the power supply, the relay, and the IO module — we’re going to talk about each of those as we go through this presentation.

Pre-Installation Wiring

Let’s talk first about our pre-installation wiring. When hooking the wires up, it’s best to take a reading of the rectifier — your volts, your amps — measure your taps to find out where you’re going to put your power supply and relay. I can’t tell you how many times, early on, I just went out there, started the install, and when I got done, the readings didn’t look correct — and there’s no way of knowing if they looked like this before, if I didn’t take a measurement ahead of time.

I usually keep a book with me, and I write down everything about the rectifier when I come up there — the readings before, the readings after, my tap settings, what my readings are on my caps — so that way, when I’m hooking everything up, I know what I need to hook it up to, and there are no mistakes afterward.

Wiring

Now, wiring — we pre-wire channels one and two to a terminal block. We have channels three and four, but we don’t pre-wire those, because about 98% of our customers only read channels one and two, so we didn’t want to clutter up your rectifier with another terminal block for something you’re not using most of the time.

And as I said, we default to channels one and two, with amps being one, two being volts. Now, with this unit, it can read plus or minus 150 volts on any of the four channels, so you’re not tied to channel two for your volts like you’ve been with some of our previous units.

We have our power supply and relay hooked up onto a terminal block, and we’ll hook those up for you in advance, so it’s easy to connect. The purple wire is your positive for amps, and the yellow wire is positive for volts — just keep in mind, for anything on the DC side, the solid wire is your positive. So if you’re hooking it up and you put your negative to that solid wire, you’re going to read a negative reading when you get back to Bullhorn Web — and if you don’t catch it before you leave, it may cause you a trip back to the field. I always want to make sure I verify all that before I leave the site.

Power Supply and Relay

Now, hooking up the relay and power supply — we’re looking for 10 to 30 volts AC on the taps. The brown and the brown-and-white wire are your relay and power supply wires. I like to hook them up to just two separate cap bolts, rather than separating all four wires — it’s a lot easier, if you find that 10-to-30-volt range, so both of them can be hooked up there. You want to make sure you keep your browns together and your brown-and-whites together.

We had to do some troubleshooting once where a customer put brown and white on one tap, and brown and white on the other — unfortunately, when he did that, he got the positive and negative from the relay together, and the positive and negative from the power supply together, so the unit didn’t work. Just one of those tips to watch out for when hooking up your unit.

Now, the power supply — don’t hook it up directly into your incoming AC, 120 or 240. So now you’re asking, what happens if I do that, because all of my other units in the past, we hook directly into the AC? Well, let me tell you — nothing’s going to happen. It’s not going to blow, this power supply is not going to let the smoke out, you’ll be fine — it’s just not going to power your unit. You just need to make sure you take it off your incoming AC and put it on your taps, where you can get that 7 to 30 volts AC. Our engineers thought ahead on this one, because everybody’s done it in the past, and we don’t want to cause damage to this power supply if somebody mistakenly hooks it up directly into the AC.

Vince
Hey, Mike, can you clarify on the power supply — is that AC and DC? Correct?

Mike
That is correct. Most of the time, on rectifiers, we’re hooking up to the AC, but it can hook up to DC as well, because there are plenty of situations where you don’t have AC — some of the solar power setups out there.

Dome Placement and Power-On Sequence

Dome placement — we talked about it earlier, but one thing I did want to point out here is: don’t hook up your antenna cable to your dome, and then to your IO module, before you get power to the unit. The reason for that is there’s no on/off switch for this RMU — once you hook that cable up from the dome, whether it’s your cell or satellite dome, to the IO module, that dome starts to look for a signal, and if it doesn’t see power, it starts a timer that says, after two hours, I’m going to shut off to save my battery, because I’ve got a battery in that dome — and if that battery falls below 3.6 volts, it’s not going to be able to transmit. So we want to save that battery voltage as much as we can.

The reason we picked two hours is our development team went out and did research across the United States, and found that the average power outage across the United States is two hours. So we figured, if we’re out longer than two hours, that’s going to be one of those situations where it may take a while, so we don’t want to run that battery too low — it’ll wake up and start transmitting again five minutes after the power comes back on.

GPS Lock Requirements

All right, this is kind of a bland-looking screen here, but I did want to point this out — it’s very important: our units will not transmit if you do not get a GPS lock. So if you’re out there and you’ve got a canopy over your RMU, it may take longer to find a GPS lock — it’s trying to find the satellites out on the horizon. If you’ve got something directly above it, or if you’re testing the unit in your office and you get it all hooked up, get power, and try to transmit — well, I’ve got good AT&T signal in the building — well, it’s still not going to transmit unless it gets a GPS lock.

When we go to conventions, you see our units fired up, they’re interrupting — but what we have to do every morning is take them out to the street, wait for them to get a GPS lock, then bring them back inside, and then they’re good for the day. But it’s got to get that GPS lock first, and sometimes that GPS lock may take a couple of minutes — so if you’ve got it hooked up, don’t expect it to transmit within two seconds after you power it up.

Bullhorn Tools

Now we’re going to talk a little bit about Bullhorn Tools. Bullhorn Tools was just recently released with our satellite version of the RMU. Now, what we see on this screen here — we’ve got an IO module with a red arrow pointing downward — you’re going to swipe downward, about where that red arrow is on the IO module, to activate Bluetooth. When you go look for this IO module, you’re not going to see that red arrow — you’re just going to see that side of the IO module, and the red arrow is just there for display, to show you where to swipe.

Once you swipe, the Bluetooth light will come on, blinking a little blue light, showing it’s ready to connect — then you can connect Bullhorn Tools. Once it connects, you’ll come to this information screen — it’s going to give you some pertinent information. It’s going to tell you your RSSI, your signal, of your unit. It’s going to tell you if you’ve got a GPS lock — if you see your latitude and longitude, you’ve got a GPS lock.

And it’s also something very important — it tells you your firmware version, of your unit — those last three or four digits, to the right, your dome firmware and your IO module firmware. This one says 12.5 — you’re looking for 12.4 or greater. If it’s 12.4 or greater, Bullhorn Tools will work fully functional, but if you have something older than that, it’ll still pop up, it’ll look like you can use Bullhorn Tools, but it won’t have all the functionality there, because the firmware that allows for Bullhorn Tools to work didn’t take place until version 12.4.

We’ve got some of our older cell units that were shipped before the satellite units that have 10.14 on them, and what we’re doing, as soon as we see those come online, is sending new firmware to them to get them up to 12.4. So Bullhorn Tools will work — if it’s something you’ve had on your shelf for several months and you’re getting ready to install it, and you’ve got good signal, as soon as you install it, we’re going to try to start installing that firmware, so it may take about 20 minutes before you can log in with Bullhorn Tools when that firmware gets updated. If you’ve got a weak signal, we’re not going to be able to update it right at that time, so you’ll probably get right in with Bullhorn Tools, but you won’t have the latest firmware.

Bullhorn Tools Screens

Now, if you notice, up in the upper left-hand corner, there are three little dashed lines. I recently had a customer tell me they had three bars on their signal strength, and that one caught me off guard — I didn’t know what they were talking about at first. But those three bars are our menu icon. I mean, I definitely understood when I saw that, because you look at bars on your phone and think that’s your signal strength — but in this case, that’s our menu bar.

Once you click on the menu bar, you’ll see the Info screen, which is your main screen; your Readings screen, where you can see your channel readings; setup templates; setup for your firmware; settings for channel setup, so you can set up your shunts on your amps channel; you can start an interruption, send a test packet, forge the packet out, and you can disconnect from Bullhorn Tools.

Now, I know one of your questions is, what if I forget to disconnect? Well — you’ve got to be within 12 feet of your IO module for Bullhorn Tools to connect. Once you get connected, it’ll stay connected until you walk away or hit disconnect. If you get more than 12 feet away, it’s going to recognize that it’s lost connection, it’s going to time out shortly thereafter, and turn off your Bluetooth.

I did want to point out the Readings screen here — this will show your readings of your Bullhorn unit, and give you the reading at the time it took the reading, from when it started up with Bullhorn Tools. If you’re making adjustments to your rectifier and you want to see your new readings, you have to hit Refresh in the lower right-hand corner — if you don’t hit refresh, it’s just going to stay static and show you what that reading was when you started up Bullhorn Tools.

Also, in the upper right-hand corner, it shows your DC input voltage — this is actually the battery voltage in the dome. You’ll see “DC input voltage” on Bullhorn Web, you’ll see it on several other things, but at this particular location, it’s for the battery voltage in the dome. This one shows 3.9 volts — that’s fully charged — and as I mentioned earlier, if it gets down to 3.6 volts, it’ll turn the radio off and wait to charge back up. But most of the time, you’re going to see it anywhere from 3.8 up to 4 volts.

Q&A

Mike
All right, any questions for me? Now — I hear this a lot when I go around town, people ask me, do you have any questions for me? And the first thing I always ask is, what’s the meaning of life? I always get strange answers from that — I catch a lot of people off guard. But in this case, we’re asking questions about the RM5.

Vince
One thing for folks that aren’t familiar with Bullhorn Tools — the display will only show the unit when you’re, like Mike said, within 12 feet of the unit you’ve enabled. So if you load Bullhorn Tools, download the app in your office, and open Bullhorn Tools, it won’t show you any of the units — again, it’s strictly just for Bluetooth configuration, and then it’ll also sync the configuration with Bullhorn Web.

We had a question about the older firmware on the cell units, with version 10.14 — Bullhorn Tools will definitely start up on that, even some of the older versions, but it’s not fully functional. It looks just the same, it’ll show you your signal strength, you just can’t do all the functionality of setting up an interruption and changing your shunt size with it there.

Vince
Hey, Mike — one of the questions is, on the new RM5 power supply, will that work on legacy products as well?

Mike
Correct — yes, it will work on either the older 4010s or 4014s, or the same thing for their older power supplies — that’ll work on this. We just prefer to use the newer one, because it’s hooked up past the rectifier’s surge protection, and it’s not as likely to take a surge from incoming AC.

Vince
We had another question about the satellite antenna — if they need to get it up higher, do we sell an extension?

Mike
We do have extensions for those — we have a 20-foot extension, so you can get that dome up higher, above a canopy, or up to a roofline, so you can get a better signal.

Vince
And, Mike, I had another question come in about solar for the RM5.

Mike
Right now, I don’t believe we have anything for solar at this time, but I’ll verify that and get back with an answer on that, for sure. Okay.