Miller Magazine Issue: 124 April 2020

78 ARTICLE MILLER / APRIL 2020 fore, a solution aiming to transmit from inside confined spaces should transmit in such a way that can penetra- te through large masses (such as grain) and make use of metal and other surfaces to propagate the signals. Grain-specific wireless sensors usually make use of sub- 1Ghz technologies to transmit their data. Getting the signal out of the grain and the elevator is the most chal- lenging task. However, even if a system can do it suc- cessfully, the use of wireless repeaters to ensure good connectivity may be an advisable solution. Besides local networking solutions that ensure data col- lection from the sensors installed inside the storage fa- cilities, internet connectivity has to be provided so that the systems can send those data streams to online inf- rastructures for being safely stored but, above all analy- zed further. Combing large amounts of data coming from different sources (aka “Big Data”) gives us the ability to Picture 1. (a,b) Wireless sensors monitoring temperature, moisture and CO2 inside a silo wall. Soon the bin will get full of product and the sensors will transmit all those conditions from inside the grain. Picture 2. A technician installing a wireless sensor in 5 minutes.