How To Tell If A Gate Has Been Left Open 2km Away

January 26, 2012

A Parabeam® Beam-set is excellent for generating a reliable alert signal whenever a vehicle or person has passed through its precise detection beam – the base receiver will also tell you visually and audibly that whatever interrupted the beam is still there. For example a car may have stopped mid-way through the beam, blocking it and preventing it from restoring.

But what if you want to know whether a gate on your property is open or closed right now? A beam-set is not really appropriate for a few reasons.
Stock may need to wander nearby and would continuously activate it, and even though you could in principle use an open gate to block the detection beam, the beam could never tell you that the gate is fully closed against the gate post. It would need to be so close to the gate as to be vulnerable to being set off on a windy day.

A better solution is a magnetic reed switch attached to the gate and gate post to sense whenever the gate is opened and left open. Our new switch-link communicator has been designed to handle this very application, and any other application requiring real-time monitoring of any binary state: open-closed / on-off.

When a gate is open the zone LED at the base receiver changes from Green (closed) to Amber (open) – an output also switches on for as long as the gate remains open. You can use this to switch on some kind of audible or visual alert that continues until the gate is closed. This could be something like a strobe light or buzzer.

You can also reverse the polarity of the sensor with a simple jumper (link) inside the ‘switch-link’ unit, so that now the output at the receiver is active when the gate is closed and vice-versa.

The connectivity range of the switch-link communicator is the same as a standard beam-set: 800m maximum, but may be extended dramatically with boost antennas or signal repeaters. Many kilometres connectivity range could be achieved using a combination of repeaters and boost antennas if needed allowing you to tell whether a gate is open or closed right now.

The current model base receiver will monitor two gates, and a switch-link communicator can be enrolled to say zone 1 while a standard beam-set is enrolled on zone 2.