July 7, 2017
By Ramon Morales, NOC Operations Team, US
It’s 2:30 AM Saturday morning and the phone rings dragging you out of a deep sleep. Groggily you answer the phone and a voice at the end of the line is alerting you that the communication system is in alarm and traffic is down. While trying to figure out what’s going on, you remember you are the person responsible for your company’s communication infrastructure. Twelve hours later, the situation is finally resolved and traffic has been restored. What could have been done differently to prevent this type of situation from occurring in the first place? This is a question you will have to answer to as part of the after-action report. During incident analysis, you discovered the affected site has not had preventive maintenance (PM) performed since it was commissioned several years ago.
PM is a proactive step in ensuring critical communication infrastructure is operating within design specifications. This level of equipment maintenance will allow technicians to identify areas that require corrective actions or repairs before problems occur. Regularly scheduled PMs will help reduce the number of system outages, thus improving overall system reliability. As a general rule, PM should be performed at least once a year. A comprehensive preventive maintenance checklist can be prepared by referring to the product manual. Following is a generic scope of work guideline to assist you in creating a comprehensive PM checklist for your specific network:
During initial installation or first PM
It is always good practice to establish a system baseline to help you identify areas requiring corrective maintenance. Information that should be collected (as applicable) during a PM are:
Yearly
Leveraging Excel to record readings will allow you to easily perform trend analysis to forecast possible performance degradation. While values to be recorded differ by technology, key metrics to be recorded for a microwave network include:
(maintenance window required)
Yearly
(maintenance window required)
Yearly
Consider the above list a primer to get you started with routine preventive maintenance. Aviat Networks offers a range of field services including preventive and corrective maintenance. Contact us at 800-227-8332 or email us at CustomerCare.Americas@aviatnet.com for information about our preventive maintenance services.
By Ramon Morales, NOC Operations Team, US