Institute of Oceanography of the University of Hamburg

• Undisturbed measuring data transfer
• Facilitating remote maintenance of radar system
• Reduction of travel and staff expenses
• VPN encryption for secure data transmission

The WERA-system is a shore-based remote sensing system for monitoring ocean surface currents, waves and wind direction. It is operated by the Institute of Oceanography of the University of Hamburg where it had also been developed and then made ready for the market in cooperation with the German measurement systems specialist Helzel. In 2009, a new station was set up at the island of Wangerooge in addition to the existing stations in Büsum and at the island of Sylt. The requirements for the connection were manifold: Apart from high resilience and remote access the technology should provide encrypted data transmission that won’t produce additional load for the host. In case of power outage, an unsupervised system restart should be possible.

Despite its location some seven kilometers off the German North Sea coast, the island is well linked to the Internet. ADSL as well as UMTS with HSPA are available. But what might be sufficient for private users, does not necessarily provide enough resilience for transmitting measured data without failure. As the outpost station perpetually sends data to the control center in Hamburg to allow long-term observations, outages should strongly be avoided. The connection was thereby established with the help of a Multichannel VPN Router 300. Equipped with one UMTS and two ADSL modules, a reliability of more than 99% was achieved. Moreover, the average bandwidth now allows remote maintenance from Hamburg.