Article

How To Ignore Kangaroos, While Detecting Vehicles

March 22, 2012

Kangaroos wander feely in many parts of urban and rural Australia and they can be a bothersome cause of unwanted activations for outdoor security sensors. We receive regular calls from Australia asking whether our Parabeam system is immune to kangaroos setting it off.

As it stands our system is immune to dogs and smaller animals because of the ability to precisely determine the height of the detection beam above ground – but unfortunately, if the animal is above waist height it will activate a Parabeam system when it crosses the beam – a large animal is indistinguishable from a person.

The ® design team have been kept on the hop with this issue and will be releasing a solution by mid June 2012 that allows vehicle detection while ignoring anything else above ground.

The new product makes use of a buried magnetic probe close to the driveway to detect a disturbance in the earth’s magnetic field as the vehicle passes. There will be three main components to the new kit: A magnetic probe, a ‘switch-link’ communicator and a solar panel.

The solar panel to supply power for the device will be larger than the standard 120x65mm panel used on our beam-sets because of increased energy requirements, but will still be relatively small.

When triggered by a passing vehicle, the base receiver will respond with an audible alert in the same way as a standard beam-set alert. You will also be able to mix and match sensor types. You could have a magnetic probe sensor on one zone and a standard beam-set on another.

If you are interested in this product please let our sales team know and we will contact you when it becomes available.