Wireless works in a plant, but you'll want to be careful regarding which "flavor" you choose

Wireless Technology now provides secure, reliable communication for remote field sites and applications where wires cannot be run for practical or economic reasons. For maintenance purposes, wireless can be used to acquire condition monitoring data from pumps and machines, effluent data from remote monitoring stations, or process data from an I/O system.

For example, a wireless system monitors a weather station and the flow of effluent leaving a chemical plant. The plant's weather station is 1.5 miles from the main control room. It has a data logger that reads inputs from an anemometer to measure wind speed and direction, a temperature gauge and a humidity gauge. The data logger connects to a wireless remote radio frequency (RF) transmitter module, which broadcasts a 900MHz, frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) signal via a YAGI directional antenna installed at the top of a tall boom located beside the weather station building. This posed no problem.

However, the effluent monitoring station was thought to be impossible to connect via wireless. Although the distance from this monitoring station to the control room is only one-quarter mile, the RF signal had to pass through a four-story boiler building. Nevertheless, the application was tested before installation, and it worked perfectly. The lesson here is that wireless works in places where you might think it can't. All you have to do is test it.

There are many flavors of wireless, and an understanding is needed to determine the best solution for any particular application.Wireless can be licensed or unlicensed, Ethernet or serial interface, narrow band or spread spectrum, secure or open protocol,Wi-fi…the list goes on. This article provides an introduction to this powerful technology.

The radio spectrum
The range of approximately 9 kilohertz (kHz) to gigahertz

(GHz) can be used to broadcast wireless communications. Frequencies higher than these are part of the infrared spectrum, light spectrum, X-rays, etc. Since the RF spectrum is a limited resource used by television, radio, cellular telephones and other wireless devices, the spectrum is allocated by government agencies that regulate what portion of the spectrum may be used for specific types of communication or broadcast.

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) governs the allocation of frequencies to non-government users. FCC has limited the use of Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) equipment to operate in the 902-928MHz, 2400-2483.5MHz and 5725-5875MHz...(Read whole article)