Hi,
We're currently looking at connecting up bulk irrigation meters for a client at various manholes out in the field. Due to the frequency of reads required (for flow-rate monitoring); the Wavenis infrastructure can't be used (battery degradation). We do have 220V power available in a DB at each manhole, but conventional powered radio modems will be too costly.
There are 'security kiosks' near to these metering points, and the security network of IP cameras runs on a single-mode fibre backbone. It's therefore possible that we can take the pulse output from the meters to an RTU, and then the RS485 output from the RTU into a suitable converter, and onto the fibre network. Have you used or tested RS485 / Fibre converters in this type of application before? Do you supply suitable converters, or suggest where can we source them from? Thanks.
Chris | Applied Metering Innovation

Since the security cameras runs on the fibre, I assume it is Ethernet? Therefore, you should have a ethernet point where you can connect an Epad3 (ethernet to RS485 converter); which then connects the RTU to the backbone. The epad3 is available from SDG. You can also buy similar converters from Mult-E-net in Cape Town, and MOXA also provide good converters.
Please make sure that we are dealing with Ethernet here first, though, since you can use fibre in more than one way.
One pitfall to check out for, is that if you want to measure water during power outages, you must make sure the RTU has battery/UPS backup, because the RTU from SDG does not count pulses when it is off (it does remember its real time clock and memory, but it stops counting pulses).