User's Manual

4-4
4. Plan for a Relay Station. Move the Base Station to where you
would expect to place the Relay and try again.
Relay Stations
Keeping all of the above factors in mind, using Relay Stations can increase your
area of coverage by 5 times. Relays work like a remote antenna, passing data to
the Base Station via cable instead of radio frequency. They don’t support
Frequency Banks. Base Stations cannot be used as a Relay Station without
changing the firmware and the jumpers inside.
Relay Stations are attached to the Base Station using a cable that connects from
the Base’s RELAY port to the Relays’ RELAY port. When you order a Relay
Station, you receive a 3-foot test cable with it. Although Relay Stations will
increase your range of operation, they will also add about ½ second to the
response time.
How Relay Stations work…
It helps to know how Relay Stations work before you add them to your system.
Although Relays increase your operational range, they also slow the response
time of your system. In order to use Relays, the Terminal must be configured to
acknowledge that Relays are present. This is done using the Relay Existence
setup parameter. By default, the RF Terminal is not configured to look for
Relays. This setup parameter can only be accessed via the RF Terminal keypad -
it cannot be configured using the bar coded RF Terminal Setup Menu. See
Chapter 2; RF System Setup for details.
Once the RF Terminal is Relay-ready, it can use the Relay instead of the Base
Station to communicate. If a RF Terminal tries to transmit 10 times to a Base
Station without a response, it broadcasts a “who can hear me” message. If both
the Base Station and the Relay hear the message, whoever answers back to the
RF Terminal first becomes the point of contact for that RF Terminal.