Intruder detection · TAKEX
It was aligned in September. In January, no.
TAKEX makes infrared beams and outdoor detection. It is the most predictable technology there is —either the beam is broken or it isn't— and the one that punishes a sloppy installation most, because it lives on alignment.
What TAKEX is and where it turns up.
A Japanese detection manufacturer, known for its active infrared beams for outdoor use —the facing multi-beam towers— and with outdoor area detectors in the same catalogue.
The beam is the easiest perimeter technology to explain: transmitter one side, receiver the other, infrared beams you cannot see, and an alarm when something breaks them. It does not measure temperatures or decide whether a vibration is wind or a person.
That predictability is its virtue: where a clean line of sight can be guaranteed, a well-built beam gives very few false alerts. You'll find it in passages between industrial units, along the sides of buildings, on walls and roofs, in material yards, at vehicle entrances, and on the boundary between two adjoining sites. And as a second technology on a stretch where the fence vibrates, because the beam knows nothing of the wind.
What it really detects, and why the beams matter.
A single beam is a binary detector and a slightly stupid one: it is broken by a person and also by a bird, a big leaf or a cat. That is why perimeter beams carry several beams at different heights, and you can require two to be broken at once before raising an alarm.
That coincidence requirement is the whole craft: a bird breaks one, a person breaks two or three because they are tall and wide. By adjusting how many beams have to coincide and within what time you separate one from the other without losing detection, and it is a decision per stretch — where there are a lot of birds you require more, where it has to be detected first time you require fewer.
The second decision is the height of the tower: whatever is above the highest beam and below the lowest does not exist for the barrier. It is geometry, and it is resolved by choosing the tower and the spread of the beams according to what is around — where somebody could jump from, how high the wall is. And the third is corners: beams run straight and a site does not, so the stretches are overlapped; if they meet end to end, the corner is the hole.
Where it falls down. This is the bit to read.
Almost all of it is visibility and alignment. Both change with the seasons.
- Fog, heavy rain, snow and dust attenuate the beam. The real usable range is a fraction of the data sheet's, which is measured in clean conditions, and building a stretch at the catalogue limit guarantees alerts every January morning in a foggy dip.
- Direct sun on the receiver. On a stretch running east to west there are two moments a day when the sun is behind the transmitter and dazzles it — and both move over the year: a stretch that is fine in June fails every October morning. The orientation is decided in the project.
- The alignment goes on its own: metal expands and contracts, the ground settles, a post takes a knock from a lorry. And the symptom is not that it stops detecting: it is that it starts raising alerts for no reason, because the beam is on the edge of being lost.
- Vegetation inside the line. A branch sixty metres away breaks the beam with every gust and cannot be seen from either end. It is the classic perimeter that starts giving trouble in spring with nobody having touched anything.
- Cobwebs. Spiders build in front of the lens because the equipment attracts insects, and a cobweb in the wind breaks the beam all night. It happens on every installation. So do snow and leaves on the hood.
- And the post. A tower bolted to a mesh fence, or held on a tube driven into the ground, moves with the wind — and moving the transmitter is breaking the beam. Half the problems with this technology are not in the equipment: they are in what holds it up.
The installation is eighty per cent of the result.
With beams it is more than eighty. The same pair of towers can last ten years or give trouble from the first week.
The posts first, because they are the equipment: rigid, anchored in concrete, with no play, and thinking about where the lorries go. If the only possible fixing is a fence, that point has to be reinforced or the technology changed for that stretch. There is no configuration that fixes a transmitter that moves.
The orientation next: the stretches are set out avoiding the sun going straight into the receiver at any time of year, and when there is no way round it the direction of the towers is alternated or another technology goes in. It is decided on the drawing, not by looking at the place at midday on a Tuesday.
And the range margin, which is the quiet decision that determines the life of the stretch most: with plenty of margin it withstands fog, rain and a few years of small misalignments; at the catalogue limit it works on the day of handover. The second comes out cheaper on the quotation and dearer on everything else. Plus the overlap at corners and joins, which is tested by walking through the corner.
Verifying: what turns an alert into a decision.
When a beam raises an alert at four in the morning, whoever is on duty knows one thing only: something crossed that line. Their two options are both bad — move somebody blind every time, which soon stops happening, or move nobody and hope.
With an image, the alert arrives with the seconds of video from the stretch. And here that has a very concrete use: knowing whether what is breaking the beam is a branch, a cat or a spider, and fixing the real problem instead of raising a threshold.
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.
There is no good technology. There is technology suited to that perimeter.
A beam fits where you can guarantee a straight, clear line that is going to stay clear: a passage between industrial units, the side of a building, a wall, a roof, the boundary between two sites. There it is predictable, cheap to maintain and hard to fool.
It does not fit where visibility is habitually poor —fog, dust in the air, frequent snow—, where there is no way of putting in rigid posts, or where the distance forces you to build at the limit of the range. There it works on the day of handover and gives trouble the first winter, which is worse than never having fitted it.
That is why two are almost always combined: fog gets in the beam's way and uneven ground and standing water get in microwave's. Two technologies that fail for different reasons, holding each other to account, give a perimeter that does not go off in bad weather and does go off with the person. We are not going to say this brand is better than the other four; we will say what we care about in this technology: it is the most predictable, and predictability is what makes an operator still believe the alerts three years later.
What we do with it.
- Walking each stretch on foot with the orientation in hand: where the sun rises and sets relative to that line, what has to be cut back, what could grow, where somebody could jump from and where a post can really be anchored.
- The route set out with plenty of range margin, written down as a criterion and not as a fudge. If the stretch is long, it gets split; if it cannot be split, the technology gets changed and we say so, even though it means selling fewer towers.
- Posts anchored in concrete, watertight ducting, backup power and tamper detection on every box: a junction box that can be opened without anybody noticing is the easiest way in there is. And the beam coincidence adjusted per stretch, according to what moves there at night.
- The commissioning with a record sheet written beforehand: crossing walking, running, crawling, high and low, and at every join, with the time and the result.
- And two maintenance tasks nobody puts in and which decide whether the stretch lasts: cleaning the optics and re-verifying the alignment, once in the cold season and once in the warm, plus clearing the line. If it is not in the contract, it does not get done.
The grade, the alarm receiving centre and what comes after.
A beam 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. Which grade each piece of equipment supports is read in its documentation; whether the installation meets that grade is another matter. We do not say here which one we hand over: it depends on the project, and it is stated 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 you have to write down what is done with the alert from each stretch and what gets verified before moving anybody. Who provides that service is settled in a quotation, not on a website.
The day to day is the client's: arming by stretch, looking at the log, knowing which stretch is which number. What they do not touch is the alignment or the beam coincidence: touching the alignment without an instrument leaves the stretch on the edge of being lost, and lowering the beam requirement so it stops being a nuisance lets a bird trip it or lets nobody trip it. And the isolation that got left in place is the way in: with an expiry date and with that date in the report.
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
Has your beam been raising alerts since the cold came?
That is almost never a fault: it is alignment, a branch or a cobweb. Tell us how many stretches there are, how they are fixed, what orientation they have and how many alerts come in each month. We will tell you what can be adjusted and which stretch was asking for a different technology from the start.