ALPINE TROOPS
Maintenance and technological upgrading of the Meteomont network

The Meteomont service of the Alpine troops has been active since 1972 to coordinate and develop all the activities aimed at increasing the safety levels of the departments that operate and train in the snowy mountain environment. In close collaboration with the Air Force Meteorological Service and with the Forest Carabinieri, in the winter season it issues a daily bulletin, also useful to the general public, with weather forecasts and snow assessments in mountain areas, with particular reference to avalanche danger.

The Meteomont Section at the Alpine Troops Command in Bolzano coordinates the work of teams operating in various Sector Centers distributed throughout the Alps and in Abruzzo. The sector centers are located in the cities of Turin, Aosta, Bolzano, Brunico, Belluno, Udine and L’Aquila. For the monitoring of weather-snow data, the Meteomont Service uses both manual surveys and a network of 48 automatic stations connected via UHF radio, the latter being the subject of the contract in question.

The award of the maintenance contract in 2022, thanks to the improvement proposal formulated by Siap+Micros, will also lead to an important technological upgrade of the Meteomont stations, in particular for the data acquisition and transmission part. In fact, Siap+Micros’ flagship data loggers, the DA18K, will be supplied and the current radio equipment will also be replaced with latest generation UHF band radio modem equipment which will allow the adoption of standard protocols in communications between the peripheral stations and the Centers Sector distributed throughout the territory. This circumstance will raise the Meteomont network to the most modern communication standards in the UHF band, in line with the dictates of the CAD (Digital Administration Code) on the subject of overcoming the technological lock-in for the information systems of the Public Administration, through the use of the MODBUS protocol, an OPEN and documented industrial communication protocol. In addition to this, in order to guarantee compliance with military-type robustness and reliability standards, the updated stations will be equipped with a dual communication vector: in addition to the primary system based on radio communications in the UHF band, each station will also have an LTE terminal for the transmission of the detected data through the cellular network.

This new order with the Alpine Troops comes a few years after the conclusion of another successful project which saw the creation, for the same Command, of a snow monitoring system at the Salang Pass built and installed during the NATO mission in Afghanistan .

The acquisition of this important contract makes us particularly proud for the relevance of the Meteomont network and further consolidates the presence of Siap+Micros in the monitoring network market on a national scale.