So you’ve wired up all your sensors and connected your burglar alarm panel to the mains – confident that if any intruders enter your property they will be detected and an audible alarm will sound. What if you want to take things one step further and have your system connected to an alarm monitoring center and have professional operators handle events for you ?
If you are a DIYer, the first thing you will have to do is find a monitoring center that will deal with you directly. While there are only a limited number of companies that will do this, an Internet search for “DIY Alarm Monitoring” or similar should provide enough results for you to find one of them.
You will need to connect your alarm panel to the telephone line in such a way that it is able to seize the line when it needs to make a call. Your alarm panel manual should provide technical instructions on how to do this.
The next step is for you to program your panel’s alarm monitoring settings. The terminology varies between different manufacturers so the following guidelines use generic terms:
In many panels you have an option to Enable Communications and this is perhaps the most important setting.
The next step is for you and the alarm monitoring company to agree on an alarm protocol. There are three groups of alarm protocols or formats – Pulse, FSK and DTMF. Unless there are very good reasons to do so, you should not choose a Pulse format as it can take around 30 seconds for an alarm signal to reach the Monitoring Center. The SIA format is an FSK protocol and is much faster at around 10 seconds for the first signal and only a couple of seconds for subsequent signals, however, by far the most popular is Ademco Contact ID, which is a DTMF protocol.
When using Contact ID, your alarm panel modem dials the telephone number of an alarm receiver at the Monitoring Center, which answers the call and receives a series of 16 DTMF tones over the telephone line. The protocol dictates what each of the digits mean and the Monitoring Center has special software to decode each signal according to the protocol.
Program your panel to use the protocol (format) agreed with your alarm monitoring provider.
Program the primary and secondary receiver telephone numbers provided by your alarm monitoring company.
Program the Account Number allocated to you by the alarm monitoring company as this will be used to identify your panel in their software system.
The above settings should be enough to get your alarm panel sending signals to the receiver at the monitoring center, however, your panel may have many more options that could be important to the way you want your panel to behave in the event of an alarm activation. Take the time to read the manual carefully and seek the assistance of your monitoring provider if you are unsure about the consequences of changing any of the settings from their default values.
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