It does things the others don't. And that is not always good.

Satel is a Polish electronic security manufacturer and its family of professional intruder detection panels is INTEGRA, with models running from a small installation to several hundred zones. It is one of those routinely specified at the top end of the European standard's grade scale; what each model and version certifies is in its certificate, and that is where you look.

You'll find it in industry, warehouses, offices, retail, residential blocks, sports facilities and agricultural units. And you'll find it a lot where something odd has to be done: automating a door with the arming, switching lights on when a zone trips, arming to a schedule with exceptions for public holidays, making the arming of one industrial unit conditional on the state of another. Because that is its real characteristic: it has timers, logic outputs and conditions that let you build behaviours instead of picking them from a list.

A classic, orderly architecture: the panel with its zones, one bus for the keypads and separate buses for the expansion modules, which add zones, outputs or readers and are spread around the building so the zone cable stays short. Zones are supervised with end-of-line resistors —in the double configuration, a single pair of wires tells alarm, tamper and cut apart— and the values are set by the manufacturer.

The building is split into partitions with their own arming, schedules and users, with part-arming and dependencies between partitions. Keypads that say which zone is stopping the arming, a supervised power supply, and transmission to the receiving centre over the network with backup over the mobile network and supervision. And the thing that defines the family's character: the installer's configuration software, which is deep, with detailed documentation and no black boxes. It is one of those systems where, if you read the manual, you can.

A panel that lets you build behaviours also lets you build labyrinths. We have opened up installations of this family with fifteen chained timers, outputs depending on other outputs and conditions that only ever existed in the head of whoever built them. It worked. And nobody could touch anything, because nobody knew what would fall over.

It is not a fault of the equipment: it is a documentation fault, and it has a fix. The configuration is saved outside the panel, with a date, and it comes with a sheet in plain language carrying one sentence for every decision that is not obvious: «output 6 opens the gate when area 2 is disarmed during working hours, because the operative arrives before the manager».

It brings what you need, and with a great deal of adjustable detail: confirmation between zones before treating an alert as a confirmed intrusion, automatic exclusion of a zone that trips repeatedly, per-zone supervision that separates alarm, tamper and fault, times and routes per partition, and a long log. Here almost all of that is tuned per zone rather than per system, and that is a real advantage: the loading bay zone does not have to have the same criteria as the office one.

The other side is that the equipment does not place the detectors. A microwave detector aimed at a plasterboard partition, which the microwave goes straight through, with a forklift working on the other side. An infrared detector in the blast from the air conditioning, which trips when the machine starts and therefore at the same time every day. An indoor detector covering a yard: a cat, a tarpaulin and the wind. And masking, which is the most common misunderstanding: a detector that gives a mask fault every morning at the same time is not broken, it is that something gets parked in front of it at that hour. Anti-masking is a detector inside the detector, and raising the alert is what it is meant to do: without it, the easiest way in is to blind the detector and wait.

The European standards classify alarm systems into security grades according to the risk, and each grade demands things of the equipment, the cabling, the power supply, the tamper detection and the supervision of the transmission. It is set by the activity, very often by the insurance policy and sometimes by a specification. This family has a reputation for letting you specify high without the budget running away, and that is true; what cannot be stated from a website is which grade each model certifies —that is in its certificate— or which grade a particular installation meets, because that depends on the whole build and is signed off by whoever hands it over. The receiving centre goes its own way, with its own contract and its own regulations, and with the obligation to verify the alert before calling the police out: hence image verification turning thirty alerts a month into thirty ten-second dismissals and the one real alert into an immediate call.

It fits when you need a fair amount of system on a contained budget and when the installation has its peculiarities: several partitions with dependencies, automations living alongside the arming, schedules with exceptions, units used in bursts. It fits very well in industry and in installations that have grown in pieces. And it fits where there is a technician who is really going to maintain it, because it rewards anybody who knows it well.

It doesn't fit if nobody is going to document it: the more you can do, the more essential it is to write down what was done, and if the client is not going to have the folder and the configuration file, a simpler panel is better. Nor if what you want is a very polished mobile app as the centre of your relationship with the system. And it doesn't fit on the very large installation with a supervised ring bus and managed multi-path transmission, where there are panels on this list designed for exactly that.

The client handles the day to day without difficulty: users and codes, who arms which partition, part-arming, schedules, inhibiting one zone temporarily and looking at the log. The permission levels are fine-grained, so you can hand over user management without handing over any of the configuration. And there is management software for the advanced user with which a maintenance manager sees the status, the log and the zones on a plan without touching the programming; on an industrial installation that gets used and it is appreciated.

What it asks of the installer is the layer underneath: adding or removing modules and zones, changing times, routes or the confirmation logic, touching the outputs and the automations, redoing partitions, changing what is transmitted to the receiving centre and upgrading the version. There is an extra reason here: the advanced logic is chained, and a small change to a timer can move something that happens three steps later. So it is touched with the documentation in front of you and with a copy of the previous configuration saved. And if the installation was handed over with a grade, any change to zones, power supply or transmission means the paperwork has to be reviewed. What is handed over and charged for: training by role and documentation that is of use, including the automation sheet and who gets which alert and in what order.