The Development of Remote Beacon Measuring System in the Zhenhai Beacon Region

Plenty of beacons in the Zhenhai beacon region are located at reef islands far away from continent. There is varied, dangerous and difficult topography at these reef islands and also the hydro meteorology is so harsh there that the condition is very difficult for the petrol inspection of beacons. When beacon works abnormally, stolen or die out, there is no way to find out and countermeasures can not be made in time, then the safety of ship navigation will be effected. A large amount of manpower and material is consumed in traditional way for management and petrol inspection of beacons, while monthly routine of petrol inspection has certain blindness and causes waste. Therefore, the implement of remote control and measurement of beacons to carry out effective dynamic real time management for them is an important approach to raise beacon management level and benefits and this is also the purpose of the development of the system.\;First, the three component parts, i.e. the sub station sampling system, the clustered data transmitting system and the central control board of the remote beacon measuring system, are briefly introduced. The various techniques applied in the process of the development of this system software such as data sampling, computer graph processing, computer data processing, clustered data transmission and network data receiving etc. are simply described. It is showed that this system has the features of utility, high activity, operating stabilization and reliance, big expandability and manifold data sampling mode etc. Then, the constitution, functions and the flow charts of the key subroutines of the central control board, the hardware block diagrams, software block diagrams, external wiring diagrams and working principles of the sub stations, the interfaces of clustered data transmitting system with the substations and the control board etc. are related in detail.\;The first stage construction of the remote beacon measuring system is that at five farther reef islands such as the Hai reef etc. one set of sub station was installed for each reef island. In the May of 1999 the system was delivered in trial operation and the results indicated that the preset objects were reached.