Yokogawa Getting Ready for Wireless

30 November 2008

At its recent users’ conference in Barcelona, Henk van der Bent (photo) said his company was poised to launch wireless sensors in the first quarter of 2009, beginning with EJX pressure and the YTA temperature transmitter.

Henk van der Bent

He said that Yokowaga wants to be active in four different levels of networks, RFID, wireless sensor networks, WLAN for mobile operator terminals, and W-WAN for long distance backhaul and high bandwidth video applications. Wireless enables more than just measurements, he noted, and said Yokogawa would deploy wireless for both process measurement and control. The company will introduce a loop powered HART wireless adapter to unlock ‘secondary data.’

Mr. van der Bent said Yokogawa much prefers the ISA100 standard, but would introduce a wireless HART ‘starter kit’ for its instruments as an early evaluation kit. He said the reason he preferred ISA100 was that it is more secure than wireless HART, it allows orders of magnitude more devices in a network, and it accommodates more fieldbus and network types.