Is your legacy communications system holding you back from a SCADA upgrade? (Presented by 4RF)

In recent years as SCADA and process controls systems have advanced there has been an explosion in the market of RTU’s and HMI’s that preferentially use Ethernet connectivity. Along with an Ethernet interface the communications protocols are changing; Where we once relied upon highly efficient bit-oriented standards like MODBUS or DNP-3 we are now seeing packet-based messaging with overhead traffic not directly related to SCADA.

The legacy, narrowband serial-only devices just do not have the capacity to meet these new demands. Many industries have had to forgo process control upgrades because of this bottleneck. Older RTU’s are often end-of-life from the manufacturer, out of warranty and completely without any security mechanisms to protect the system from tampering.

Speaker: Tisha Hayes, 4RF Senior Engineer

Tisha Hayes is a Senior Engineer with 4RF USA. Her responsibilities include pre-sales engineering support, proof of concept testing, testing competing products in head-to-head bench and field conditions and as a liaison to engineering and consulting firms.

Tisha has more than 35 years of experience with wireless radio technologies, SCADA RTU’s, instrumentation, process control and cyber-security for the electric, water, wastewater and gas utilities. Additionally, Tisha has worked in the petrochemical industry in oil and gas production, products pipelines, carrier-grade telephony at a CLEC/IXC and for several systems integration companies. Most recently Tisha was a Principal at a large consulting company in their Energy and Utilities practice.

She has designed wireless networks, worked as the project manager on many large deployments, provided on-site engineering field support during commissioning and led the ongoing operations of SCADA networks.

One of Tisha’s strengths is in the analytical approach of evaluating different wireless technologies and competing products in a lab setting that closely approximates field conditions under a variety of interference, propagation conditions while validating serial and Ethernet performance.

She is a graduate of the University of Illinois, has collected a large number of industry and vendor specific certifications and is an extra class amateur radio operator.

Speaker: Jeff Staples
As CEO, Jeff is responsible for oversight of Ground Control’s California manufacturing facility, as well as their Las Vegas Demonstration Center. He works closely with Engineering and Sales Departments to enhance current product lines, as well as design new solutions. Jeff has over two decades of experience in sales and management. He graduated with a Bachelor’s degree from California Polytechnic State University.

4G LTE cellular technology has seen extensive adoption around the world in public and private networks due to its higher spectral efficiency/capacity, configurable QoS, support for mobility, flexible spectrum deployment options, a global vendor ecosystem and a roadmap for continuous improvements and enhancements leading to LPWAN variants like LTE-M and NB-IoT and evolution to 5G. This presentation will focus on the wireless communications fundamentals that form the foundation of LTE air interface design.

Speaker: Ajay Grewal, Sr Systems/Software Engineer
Ajay is a senior engineer working on the design and development of GE MDS Orbit wireless bridging/routing platform with particular focus on integration of cellular (LTE/5G) and Wi-Fi radio technologies, networking features like dynamic IP routing, network redundancy, security features like IPsec VPN/DMVPN as well as interworking with network management systems. He has extensive experience in Linux-based C/C++ embedded network software development and maintains keen interest in wireless communications fundamentals, software defined radio (SDR) and network automation. He has Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology in India and Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University (PSU) in USA.