Belden’s Hirschmann OpenBAT-R nominated for “Hermes Award”

Neckartenzlingen, Germany - April 8, 2013 - Hirschmann Automation and Control, a Belden Brand, is once again presenting a number of new products at this year’s Hanover Fair. These include the access point OpenBAT-R from the Hirschmann range, which provides extremely reliable data transmissions even in a harsh industrial environment. For the first time, it even enables real-time and safety applications via WLAN. An independent jury nominated Hirschmann Automation and Control and four other manufacturers for the "Hermes Award" – the International Technology Prize of the Hanover Fair. With this prize, being awarded this year for the tenth time under the patronage of the Federal Minister of Education and Research, Prof. Dr. Johanna Wanka and the state premier of Lower Saxony, Stephan Weil, Deutsche Messe AG honors outstanding innovations that have premiered at the exhibition in Hanover.

Prof. Dr. Peter Fröhlich, Director of Business Development at Belden EMEA, is convinced that OpenBAT-R will open up a wealth of new possibilities for wireless communication in automation and other mission-critical applications. Previously, users demanding such high availability would not have relied on WLAN according to IEEE 802.11. "Thanks to our new technology the transmission reliability offered by OpenBAT-R is in a whole new category. We have improved the latency and jitter caused by retransmissions by a factor of more than 10, which means that even real-time and safety applications are now possible via WLAN."

As Fröhlich points out, this is down to the Clear Space technology, which ensures stable wireless connections even under extremely difficult conditions. "We have developed a wireless module specifically designed for the requirements of industrial environments where there are numerous sources of interference and reflections. We already suppress the interference in the receiver." Surge protection has been improved dramatically at the same time. "Local lightning strikes are picked up by WLAN antennas and are capable of destroying conventional access points. Our Clear Space receiver module diverts such voltage spikes quite safely," says Fröhlich.

OpenBAT-R can also operate two separate radio channels simultaneously, even in different frequency bands. "These two channels can then be combined using PRP, which is a protocol that we also use to provide fault-tolerance in energy distribution applications. We combine this fault tolerance with WLAN to thus achieve the reliability and real-time precision of a cable connection," continues Fröhlich. "OpenBAT-R really opens up a host of new applications."