Remote monitoring boosts VSAT uptime
Imtech Marine’s monitoring station.
As vessels become more like a floating office, there’s an increasing trend towards remote monitoring and maintenance, especially since it can lead to significant cost savings for ship owners.
This has extended to communication equipment. Imtech Marine can continually monitor a vessel’s VSAT equipment and airtime, connectivity wherever the vessel is in the world, and usually repair it remotely too.
Rob Verkuil of Imtech explained, “We have all the tools to check the systems. We can monitor the VSAT system and proactively check connections with the vessel. Then if we see a potential issue we can inform the captain and the ship owner before they have even realised the problem onboard.”
“Being able to sort problems out remotely is very important to improve the uptime of vessels and the fact that Imtech does this proactively, rather than waiting to hear from those onboard, helps avoid costly delays when waiting to get things fixed”, stressed Paul Frank of Imtech.
He explained that if it can be seen that there is a problem with a satellite link, it can warn vessels that their equipment may not work for a time or if a so-called sun outage occurs it is now possible to alert the crew that the communications equipment will be affected.
If there is a problem on board, an Imtech engineer can intervene and reconfigure the system. “Imagine if a ship develops a problem with its communication equipment between Rotterdam and Singapore and is not due to make other port calls, then equipment could be out of action for two weeks or more, said Mr Verkuil.
“Ship owners would have to go to the expense of either flying out an engineer to sort out the problem or hire a local company the next time they are in port, all of which sees costs mount. It is also highly inconvenient because more and more information is shared between ship and shore.
“By remote monitoring they don’t have to wait for the next port call or divert, we can repair the system mid-ocean by accessing the IT system and doing the necessary repairs straight away. Ultimately this saves money and reduces the total cost of ownership.”
Imtech Marine can also maintain the system remotely, also giving more uptime.
Imtech Marine believes remote monitoring technology will eventually extend to all the other equipment such as radars and engines. “Everything is starting to have IT connections. Most engine manufacturers already have IT support which is accessible ashore.
“In the future, one engineer could monitor a fleet of say, six workboats for instance, and repair problems remotely rather than having one engineer per vessel,” Mr Verkuil said, adding, “Essentially remote monitoring and maintenance helps save the ship owner money which is vital, particularly in today’s challenging market.”
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