Multi-Tech Systems 7600, 7500 manual Time-Synchronization Blackout Considerations

Changing Default Blackout Settings ION 7500 / ION 7600 User’s Guide

CAUTION

Only edit the registry information detailed here. Making changes to other registry settings can have undesirable, possibly detrimental, effects on your system.

There are two registry entries that control the time-synchronization blackout behavior. These registry settings are both of type REG_DWORD and can be found in the same directory as the other ION Enterprise registry entries.

TimesyncBlackoutInterval_mins

Default value: 5

This entry is specified in minutes. It must have a value greater than 1 in order for time-synchronization blackouts to occur. A value of 60 or greater configures blackouts to occur once an hour.

TimesyncBlackoutDuration_secs

Default value: 150 (2 minutes 30 seconds in seconds)

This entry is specified in seconds. A value of 0 (zero) disables the blackout feature. This entry cannot have a value greater than or equal to 3600 (one hour).

NOTE

If you want to disable the blackout feature but keep time synchronization enabled, set the

TimesyncBlackoutDuration_secs register to 0.

There are certain settings for these registry entries that can disable time synchronization in general (not just the blackout feature). These are as follows:

TimecyncBlackoutInterval_mins < 1

TimesyncBlackoutDuration_secs >= 3600 (1 hour)

uTimesyncBlackoutDuration_secs (the value converted to minutes) >= TimecyncBlackoutInterval_mins

Do not use any of these settings to disable time synchronization. If you want to disable time synchronization for a particular device, use the ION Management Console to do so.

Time-Synchronization Blackout Considerations

Remeber to specify TimesyncBlackoutInterval_mins in minutes and

TimesyncBlackoutDuration_secs in seconds.

When your values are bad, an error is sent to the system log database. If time synchronization signals are not occurring, check the system log to see if there’s an error message about your blackout values.

When reviewing time synchronization messages in the system log, remember that the time in the message is not the time to which the meter was time synched, but rather it is the time the message was posted to the system log. The message is posted after the meter is time synched.

Page 358 Time Synchronization & Timekeeping Technical Note