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Gold/Mining/Energy : Unitec Int. Controls Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Link Lady who wrote (629)	11/29/1998 5:03:00 PM
From: John B. Smyth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 856

Hi Wendy, thanks for asking, I'm feeling great, it was just a slight touch of flu. I have been amazed at the Y2K concerns and the lengths that our customers are going to verify compliance of their systems (not just the SCADA). We have tested our equipment to satisfy ourselves and to provide verification based on actual tests. Several customers have run test on our equipment independently and advised us that they found ours to be compliant. Later this month, Renaissance Energy will be running additional tests on their entire wellhead and gas pipeline system. We will be sending one of our engineers to site to assist. One of the features of our equipment is the ability to remotely reprogram the field equipment. As some of the systems operate in inaccessible areas, we simply change the RTU real time calendar clocks (RTC) from the master station and observe the results. We use a Dallas Semiconductor device as our RTC in our standard systems. In testing and reviewing our new micro-RTU (that's the one that processes data in 1 second that our competitors unit takes 5.5 minutes) we searched the web for reports on all the devices. Surprisingly, we found some negative reports on the RTC we were looking at for that unit. Fortunately, there are pin for pin compatible alternates, and a compliant device (probably Dallas again) will be selected prior to commencing commercial deliveries. It's not a problem. I would say that most SCADA manufacturers are now compliant with Y2K. All the tenders that have come out in the past few years have required it. The only problems will be in the older installed equipment, and I'm sure most manufacturers have addressed this issue or independent contractors have had a field day capitalizing on the shortsightedness. We addressed this issue in our early design reviews. We specified a 20 year life cycle in the design, so addressed Y2K, CPU footprint, availability of components, manufacturing process etc. etc. We are currently going through the same reviews on our new generation of hardware, and have a VERY exciting new O/S platform which we will introduce shortly. Regards, John