Our flagship product is Alphawave Satellite CAM, a versatile and extensible control and monitoring system. Any piece of equipment which provides status and accepts configuration using a computer interface can be connected to a CAM machine and controlled completely from a user-friendly windowed environment. Alphawave Satellite CAM runs on the Windows (XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10), Mac OSX and Linux (x86, ARM) platforms and a version which allows the GFX graphical interface to run on the Android mobile operating system is available to trial.
The primary user interface is CAM-GFX, our custom written GUI. It provides a single, consistent view of all equipment in the network. A network explorer allows quick drill down to individual network components. There are a large number of customization options available which allow users to build up their own views of the equipment in the network: for example, racks of equipment can be configured to reflect their actual location in the comms room. Chains can also be made which show the complete delivery chain from hub modem -> amplifier -> distant receiver -> modem.
Monitoring and status
CAM provides day-to-day monitoring and control of the equipment within the network, complete link reconfigurations are even possible over-air. Full alarm logging and reporting is included with a single screen showing the health of any piece of equipment, any site or the network as a whole. Alarms can be categorized into Information, Notice, Warning, Faults and Critical faults. They can be acknowledged to indicate operation attention and may also become latched when the alarm condition clears. Trigger levels and hysteresis times are user-configurable on a per-alarm basis. Any alarm can generate a user configurable audible notification, visual alert, SNMP trap, SMS message or email.
Equipment status can be written to a file once a day with changes to the status of the equipment (e.g. faults, power level fluctuations, Eb/No, BER stats) logged as they happen. Adjustments to configuration, either by CAM or from the equipment itself are also logged. These statistics can be loaded into a spreadsheet for analysis or turned into availability graphs and Quality of Service information.
Access control
Full-control or read-only access can be granted on a user by user basis. This allows sysops full control of the network, but can restrict comms-room staff to a simple ‘view only’. CAM can operate as an SNMP gateway and provide full SNMP control and monitoring of non-SNMP-aware devices. MIBs are available for all our supported devices thus providing a simple way of integrating this equipment into an SNMP-based management system (e.g. HP OpenView).
Controlling equipment at remote sites
Connection to remote sites can be made using the in-band IP or ‘Engineering Service Channels’ built in to most modems. Using these links, full remote management of both distant equipment and CAM PC is possible. Standard net tools such as telnet and ftp can be used for system admin. PSTN Dial-up access to the remote CAMs can be utilized in the event of link failure to diagnose problems without solely relying on the ‘over air’ control.
For a fully resilient solution, it is best to install a CAM PC at each remote site. In the event of a network failure, the equipment can still be controlled via a dialup connection to the CAM PC. This will also allow an engineer at the remote site to monitor and control both the local hardware and the entire network, given sufficient privileges.
It’s also possible to use other methods of remote control, such as inbuilt equipment features (the ‘linked M&C’ feature of Paradise modems, for example) or serial-to-IP converters (allowing serial control ports on the hardware to be directly addressed over the network). However, none of these will provide the resilience or flexibility of a dedicated CAM PC.
Screenshots
Pricing
Please contact us to discuss pricing options.