Intruder detection · CIAS
Two houses make microwave. That is not indecision on our part: it is the ground.
CIAS is an Italian manufacturer of microwave barriers and perimeter protection. It shares its physics with another on this list and even so they are not chosen the same way. What it detects, where it falls down and what decides which one goes on each stretch.
What CIAS is and where it turns up.
An Italian manufacturer dedicated to perimeter protection. Its main family is bistatic microwave barriers —transmitter one side, receiver the other, an invisible field between the two— and its catalogue also has sensors for fences and for wall copings, and units that put two technologies in the same box.
It turns up on industrial and logistics sites, recycling plants, water and energy installations, storage yards, dealerships and open-air material stores. And a great deal in southern Europe through distribution and local support, which weighs more than it does in a brochure.
Like the whole microwave family, it goes on the stretches with no fence: a gap, an open yard, a lorry entrance, a wall coping. And as a second line inside a fence line that already has detection — two lines that have to agree with each other.
What it really detects, and what the processing adds.
The physics is that of any bistatic barrier: between the transmitter and the receiver an invisible volume is formed, wide in the middle and narrow at the ends, and the receiver listens to a steady signal that any body disturbs. From that come its three virtues: it does not care about light or heat, it goes through rain and fog far better than anything optical, and it detects the very slow — somebody crossing on all fours or rolling.
What separates one unit from another within the same physics is the processing: what the electronics does with the signal before deciding that is an alarm. That is where the options the installer has in hand live — what size and what speed count as relevant, how long the disturbance has to last, how much slow variation in the surroundings is tolerated.
The practical consequence: two barriers with the same range on the data sheet can behave very differently on the same stretch, because what changes is not the range but how much can be adjusted. And that is only used if somebody sits down in front of the unit, at night, with the wind that blows there.
Where it falls down. This is the bit to read.
It is the physics of any bistatic microwave, so the enemies are the same. None of them is fixed with configuration.
- Standing water. A puddle inside the field reflects it and deforms it, and the alerts start every time it rains. It is fixed with drainage and levelling. It is the number one cause, and the one most often attacked by fiddling with the unit.
- Vegetation inside the volume, which grows on its own: a corridor clear in March has thirty centimetres of grass in May. And accumulated snow, which raises the ground and narrows the field from below.
- Undulating ground. The field runs straight between the two heads and the ground does not: a dip leaves a gap you can crawl through. Where it cannot be levelled, the stretch is split.
- Metal that moves inside it: a loose fence, a gate, a sign, a tarpaulin, a lorry parked where there was nothing before. Every gust is an alert, and it almost always shows up after handover.
- The dead zone next to the heads, which forces you to offset the stretches sideways and overlap them instead of putting them in line, end to end.
- And interference between nearby units, the most baffling fault of all: alerts with no pattern and with nothing happening. It occurs between two of your own stretches badly allocated and also with the neighbour's equipment — the day the company next door fits its barrier, the problem can show up on yours.
The installation is eighty per cent. The adjustment, the ten that decides.
The ground first: a corridor levelled, compacted, drained and cleared, and staying that way. It is civil works and it is part of the detection, however much it looks in the quotation like a line item from another trade. A field over irregular ground with puddles is not fixed by configuring it.
Then the posts: rigid heads anchored to concrete, with no vibration and no play, and thinking about where the lorries go. A head bolted to a mesh fence moves in the wind, and moving the head means disturbing the field: the unit detects its own movement and nobody understands why. The height and the width of the volume are adjusted stretch by stretch, because the ground on each stretch is different.
And the fine adjustment, which is where the stretch is won or lost: on site, at night, with somebody crossing walking, running, on all fours and rolling, and at the join with the next stretch. It is repeated after the first heavy rain, when the puddles nobody had seen appear.
Verifying: what turns an alert into a decision.
When a stretch raises an alert, all you know is that something has come into that volume: a person, a boar, a bag blown by the wind, yesterday's puddle. And the two options for whoever is on duty are both bad — sending somebody out blind every time, which stops happening, or sending nobody and trusting.
With an image, the alert arrives with the seconds of video from that stretch. And on microwave that also works as a diagnosis: it is the only practical way of knowing WHY it fired, and of fixing the puddle, the sign or the grass instead of raising a threshold and losing the detection.
There is something to declare here: in the same house there is IRIS Neural, the NVMS of Infinity Neural, the other company in this group. It is our own product, and we say so because recommending your own without warning is not on. It adds the image of what set the alarm off; it does not replace the barrier or the panel. With other video software it is done too; with nothing that lets you look, it is not.
If two houses make microwave, what decides which goes on each stretch.
That is the real question. And the answer is not which is better: we are not going to say that, and not out of diplomacy.
What decides which unit goes on a stretch is not the logo. It is the geometry —metres, corridor width, slope, how much dead zone is tolerated—, how power and communications are taken to it, how many nearby stretches have to be allocated without getting in each other's way, and what spares are behind it when something fails on a Friday. If the cable does not reach that point, you have to look at what power and link options exist for that particular unit, because not every family offers the same.
And before that: there is no good technology, there is technology suited to THAT perimeter. Microwave is the best answer for a stretch with no fence, for a gap, for an open yard and for a place with regular fog; and the worst for irregular ground that cannot be levelled or for a yard where people park wherever suits them. That is why a site is never one single technology, and two are almost always combined: fog gets in the way of the optical and standing water gets in the way of the microwave, so they do not fail at the same time.
The entirely honest part, and it holds for the five perimeter houses on this list: what decides the result most is not the brand. It is the drainage, the clearing, the post anchored to concrete, the support that answers in your hours and somebody coming back to readjust it after the winter.
What we do with it.
- Walking the perimeter on foot, stretch by stretch: slope, undulations, where it puddles, what grows, what gets parked and what metal moves. And after rain if we can.
- The check on what microwave equipment is already nearby, ours or the neighbour's, so that frequencies are allocated at design stage instead of discovering the interference at commissioning.
- The civil works line item stated separately: levelling, compaction, drainage and posts anchored to concrete. If the ground cannot be prepared, we say so and propose another technology for that stretch.
- The design with the stretches split according to the ground, the overlaps offset sideways, the dead zones marked and which camera watches each stretch. And the fine adjustment on site, at night and with somebody crossing in all four ways, not with a catalogue value.
- The commissioning with a certificate written beforehand and a second pass after the first heavy rain. Plus clearing, drainage, cleaning of the heads and seasonal readjustment inside the contract: if the clearing is not written down, the stretch decays on its own and the equipment gets the blame.
The grade, the alarm receiving centre and what comes after.
A microwave barrier is a zone on a panel. The EN 50131 standards classify systems into security grades, and each grade demands specific things of the equipment, the cabling, the power supply and the tamper detection. What grade each unit supports is read in its documentation, unit by unit; the installation meeting that grade is another matter. We do not say here which one we hand over: it depends on the design, and it is asserted in writing by whoever signs.
Connecting to an alarm receiving centre is a separate decision, with its own regulations and its own contract, and outdoors the protocol has to be written stretch by stretch: what is done with each alert, what is verified before sending somebody out and who is called if the first does not answer. Who provides that service is settled in a quotation, not on a website.
The day-to-day belongs to the client: arming by stretch, looking at the log and knowing which stretch each number is. What they do not touch is the adjustment or the aim of a head: lowering the sensitivity so it stops being a nuisance is how a stretch stops detecting without anybody finding out, and on microwave it is silent because there is nothing to look at. And the isolation that got left in place is the way in.
The other eight in this group.
Four more perimeter houses and the four control panels all of this connects to. None is better than another: what changes is the ground they hold up on.
Get started
Tell us the stretch and we will tell you whether it is one for microwave.
Tell us how many metres it is, whether there is a fence, what the ground is like, whether it puddles, what gets parked inside it and whether there are other barriers nearby. We will tell you what technology that stretch asks for, what building work it needs and what we would put alongside it so it does not go off in bad weather.