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.