Digital Wireless Sensor Telemetry
What can it do for me and how do I use it?
by Summation Research
An old adage in the instrumentation community says, "Measurement is the beginning of knowledge" and through the years information from sensors such as strain gauges, pressure transducers, and thermocouples has helped engineers and technicians gain insight into important operational parameters. However, even the best data is worthless if it cannot be collected and analyzed. When the item being tested is in motion, such as with a rotating shaft or a moving vehicle, sensor data can be difficult or impossible to acquire. In these instances reliability, or longevity, can be lost with traditional hard-wired techniques. In other situations, a hostile environment around the test unit dictates that sensitive (and often expensive) instrumentation or logging equipment must be located some distance away from the actual sensors.
With the advent of wireless digital telemetry products, users facing these situations have a solution that not only provides a robust technology for existing applications, but also significantly expands the possible uses of today's modern sensors. By offering lower cost, improved measurement accuracy, true hands-off operation, and more robust and user-selectable wireless connection methods, these products offer a cost effective and timely solution to a multitude of traditionally hard-wired applications.
In a nutshell, telemetry can encompass the entire process by which a measurement value is obtained, possibly quantified, qualified, or processed in other ways, and then transmitted via some mechanism to the end user for final processing or responses. The end user in this case may be a human for manual interpretation and analysis or, more often, a machine for automated processing functions. The phrase digital telemetry simply specifies that the method used to obtain, process, and transmit measurement data incorporates digital techniques, which is a highly-efficient and more reliable means of handling data processing and transmission.
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