Creating Installations

One word, three meanings. In SBN, "account" can refer to a billing account, a contract, or an installation. They are different records: the installation is the monitored premises — the thing with a CID, zones and alarms — while billing accounts and contracts belong to the commercial side. This module says installation throughout; where a screen label says "account", read it against this distinction.

Service/Data Entry (#559) is where installations are born and maintained. Field-by-field detail for every tab lives on the Data Entry Master and Basics reference page; zones get their own module.

How the module progresses

1. Find your way around the Data Entry screen, so mode and focus never surprise you.
2. Create an installation from nothing and save it.
3. Give the installation its signal identity — validation and test supervision.
4. Sub-zone a family of installations under a master.
5. Reuse work — templates and copying.
6. Read the installation's own history in the Change Log.

1. Find your way around Data Entry

Task: name what you are looking at — which half of the screen has focus, and which mode the screen is in.

Two halves, one focus. The screen's upper section is the installation master; the lower section is a row of tabs (Basics first, always). [CTRL+T] toggles focus between the halves — the first fields of the section you land in flash briefly so you can see where you are, and keyboard actions apply to the focused section.

Three modes. Display mode is read-only. New mode (New Record [F3]) opens every field for a new installation. Change mode opens the current record for editing — and the Basics tab only accepts input in New or Change mode. Required fields show yellow wherever they appear; a save with any of them empty is refused, and the empty fields flash to show you which they are.

Worked example (Branch TRAIN): open MILLER (TRA-00002), press [CTRL+T] a few times and watch the focus move; enter Change mode, click into the Basics tab, then cancel without saving.

Guided practice: point out three required fields by colour alone, then say which mode you would need to be in to fill them.

Independent practice: with the installation in display mode, explain why typing does nothing — then get the screen ready for edits in one keystroke.

2. Create an installation from nothing

Task: create a complete residential installation and save it.

The two numbers come first. A new installation needs a CID (what the receiver reports) and an Installation No (what the alarm company files it under). Both can be typed manually or generated (Auto Generate CID [F6], Auto Generate Ins# [F7]) — in this training every number is typed by hand from your reserved range, so no two trainees collide.

Steps:

1. In #559, choose New Record [F3].
2. Enter the CID and the Installation No from your reserved range.
3. Complete the yellow required fields — data in CAPS, phones as xxx-xxx-xxxx.
4. Complete the Basics tab: name, address, postal code.
5. Save Record [ENTER].

A postal code the system doesn't know opens the New Zip Code window: fill it in once and SBN adds it to Zip Codes (#1718) for everyone after you.

Worked example (Branch TRAIN): create one residential installation from your reserved range — CID, Installation No, required fields, full address — and save it.

Guided practice: create a second installation, commercial this time, and let one required field stay empty on the first save attempt: watch the refusal, read which fields flashed, fill them, save.

Independent practice: create an installation whose name and address carry accented characters, save it, then find it again with a search on the accented name.

3. Give the installation its signal identity

Task: set up the installation so the receiver can verify who is calling, and so silence gets noticed.

Signal validation — proving the caller. Each row of the CID grid carries a Panel Phone and a Caller ID check box. With the box checked, the panel is expected to send caller ID, and SBN compares what arrives against the Panel Phone field(s); if the Panel Phone fields are blank, SBN stores the first caller ID it sees there. Sites using GSM panels can validate against the SIM card number instead (an option governs which comparison runs; SIM cards are maintained on the SIM Phone tab).

Test supervision — noticing silence. A Test Interval on the CID tells SBN how often the panel must report in, entered as ddd:hh:mm:ss — days, hours, minutes, seconds. When no qualifying signal arrives within the interval, SBN generates a missing test signal, which travels the normal signal path and reaches an operator as an alarm. The interval can also be scheduled to change later (New Test Interval + date), and a site can cap how many missing-test alarms one silent installation raises.

Steps:

1. Open your commercial installation, enter Change mode.
2. On its CID row, set the Panel Phone and tick Caller ID.
3. Set the Test Interval to daily — 001:00:00:00.
4. Save.

Worked example (Branch TRAIN): the steps above, on the commercial installation you created in section 2.

Guided practice: set your residential installation to a weekly test interval, and say in one sentence what SBN will do on day eight if the panel stays silent.

Independent practice: a customer reports their panel "tests every day at 3 AM" — name each field you would check to confirm the installation is actually supervised for it, without changing anything.

4. Sub-zone a family of installations

Task: read — and be able to build — a master with sub-zoned installations under it.

Master first, always. One premises can hold several reporting installations. The master installation is created first and marked with the Subzone check box; each sub-zoned installation then names it in its Master CID field. The sub-zone relationship is what gives you a combined Alarm Log on the master.

How a signal reaches the sub. The panel reports the master's CID — the sub-zoned installations never appear on the wire. The redirect lives in the master's zones: a zone on the master whose text begins with # followed by a sub's CID hands every signal on that zone over to that CID, and the signal is then processed on the sub-zoned installation — matched against the sub's own zone list, described, prioritised and alarmed there. A master zone without the # prefix alarms on the master itself. The redirect is a single hop: a # zone on the sub does not forward again.

Steps (building the family):

1. Create the master installation and tick Subzone.
2. Create each sub-zoned installation with its own CID, naming the master in Master CID.
3. On the master, add a zone per redirected zone number, with text # + the sub's CID.
4. Define the real zone — description, type, priority — on the sub itself. (Zone mechanics are the Zones module.)

Worked example (Branch TRAIN): open the PLATEAU master (TRA-00006) and find the Subzone check box; open PLATEAU A (TRA-00006-01) and read its Master CID field; back on the master, open the Zones tab and decide, zone by zone, where a signal on it will alarm — on the master itself, or redirected to a sub by a # text; finish in the master's combined Alarm Log, where both subs' events appear.

Guided practice: open PLATEAU B (TRA-00006-02) and confirm the same sub-zone relationship, then state the creation order — and the # zone entries — you would need to build the family from scratch.

Independent practice: sketch (on paper) a two-building campus with one master: which box is ticked where, which installation exists first, and the exact zone text on the master that sends building B's zone signals to building B's installation.

5. Reuse work — templates and copying

Task: never type the same installation twice: start from a template or copy an existing record.

Templates are read-only installations. Tick Read only on an installation's Basics tab and save: it is now a template — protected from casual edits, and ready to be copied into new installations. (A zone template such as TMPL-CID is a different thing: it is attached to a CID and matched at signal time, never copied — the Zones module.)

Copy Current Record [F5] clones the installation on screen into a new one — all data, zones, action plans and open/close schedules. The first question it asks is whether to clear the required fields: Yes gives you a skeleton to fill; No copies everything. Then enter the new CID and Installation No and save.

Copy Zone/Plan [SHIFT+F4] — from the Import Zone/Action Plan dialog you pick another installation and copy just its zones, action plans, contacts, inspection devices, physical components or panel defaults into the current one. The Change Log records the choice as a string of X and O in the Field column — one letter per category, X copied, O skipped.

Worked example (Branch TRAIN): open TMPL-COMM, Copy Current Record [F5], answer Yes to clearing required fields, give it a CID and Installation No from your reserved range, complete the cleared fields and save.

Guided practice: on your new installation, use Copy Zone/Plan [SHIFT+F4] to bring in MILLER's action plans — contacts included, panel defaults skipped — then find the X/O record of that choice in the Change Log.

Independent practice: make one of your own installations a template, prove it resists editing, then copy it into a fresh installation and state when you would answer the clear-required-fields question with No.

6. Read the installation's own history

Task: answer "who changed what, and when" from the Change Log tab.

How it works. Every change to the installation lands in the Change Log tab: an abbreviation names the field, and the From and To columns show the value before and after. Copy operations log their X/O category string here too (section 5).

Worked example (Branch TRAIN): open the Change Log on the installation you built in section 2 — every save you made is there; match one row's From/To to an edit you remember making.

Guided practice: find the test-interval change from section 3 in the log and read its before and after values.

Independent practice: using only the Change Log, reconstruct the order of everything you did to your commercial installation, and point to the row that proves the caller-ID validation was switched on.

7. Quick reference

Field conventions: required fields are yellow · data in CAPS · phones xxx-xxx-xxxx · test intervals ddd:hh:mm:ss.

"Account" disambiguated: billing account, contract, or installation — this module's record is the installation, the monitored premises.

Master/sub in one line: master exists first, master ticks Subzone, each sub names the master in Master CID; a master zone whose text starts #<sub-CID> redirects that zone's signals to the sub — and the master's Alarm Log shows the whole family.