The Research Center for Ecology and Environment of Central Asia (RCEECA for short) has set up an Ecosystem Monitoring and Research Network in Arid Regions of Central Asia, consisting of 15 ecosystem field observation and research stations (field stations for short) in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. In the daily operation and maintenance of the monitoring network, equipment failures cannot be found and handled timely and therefore monitoring data are discontinuous because the field stations are often far away from towns and densely populated areas. Moreover, in sparsely populated areas, the traditional ground mobile communication network for mobile phones also has signal coverage blind areas, so stable information transmission also cannot be guaranteed.

In order to solve the above problems and ensure stable operation and and continuous data acquisition of the monitoring network in Central Asia, RCEECA, combining with the actual situation of equipment in field stations and taking advantage of the short message function of China’s Beidou Communication Satellite System, organized technical personnel to develop the Field Station Beidou Short Message Remote Monitoring Module and made a breakthrough.

The coverage area of short message of Beidou Communication Satellite System is between 70°-140° east longitude and 5°-55° north latitude, with the advantages of all-weather service and no blind area. The amount of running status parameter information of field stations is small, suitable for long-distance transmission through short message. However, now there are many manufacturers of field station observation equipment, and their internal specifications and protocols are different from each other, no unified and directly usable Beidou short message communication module.

Therefore, according to the data acquisition parameters of the two automatic weather stations Vaisala AWS310 and Dynamet-1k currently used in the field stations, a special Beidou module for equipment operation status monitoring is developed, which can be successfully connected to the field stations currently in operation. Adopting the protocol translation encoding board of the embedded system and taking advantage of the function of Beidou satellite short message communication and the RS485-ModBus Protocol, the module can acquire the information of power supply and the working status of sensors of corresponding weather stations by sending specific characters through SMS at the end user side.

At present, the developed test module has realized successful remote acquisition of photovoltaic power supply data and viewing of Vaisala AWS310 data acquisition status, etc by sending query messages. It is planned to customize Beidou module running boards for special status monitoring in batches next year, so as to realize the status monitoring and management of meteorological observation equipment in all field stations and greatly improve the management level and operation and maintenance efficiency of field stations.

Beidou short message module development board