Does anyone know if the Elk M1 Gold has a communication log that lists the communication attempts made to the alarm company? I'm attempting to figure out why there was an 18 minute delay in the reporting of the alarm to the company. The standard log file doesn't seem to contain any information about the dial out attempts.
Elk Communication Log
- Thread starter jstaab
- Start date
I'm somewhat under the impression that if there is a complete communication failure, a message will display on the keypad, but I'm not 100% certain if this is true. In my case, nothing displayed. However, that also doesn't tell me if it kept retrying if it failed and over what period of time.
WayneW
Senior Member
True, a complete comm failure will result in a comm failure trouble. So maybe your message finally got through after 18 minutes of trying?
I checked back in my log to when I had my router failure. the daily test was at 9 am. The "fail to communicate" trouble was logged at 9:18 AM. At the time I had two phone numbers, and I think it was configured to retry each number for 8 times, so that would have been 16 dial attempts. Maybe the Elk takes a full minute to time out on a failed dial attempt? That seems poor. Hopefully Spanky will comment here or in my "Best Practices for CS notification, Elk M1, NextAlarm, UpLink" thread http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=12497
Well, there is a tad bit more to this. I too am using NextAlarm with their ABN adapter. I'm attempting to find out if the ABN has a communication log. I logged into the ABN, and there is no log available, but there is an ADMIN menu that I can not access. I have a support ticket inquiring into what's in the admin menu and if there is any log there. I'm really surprised the M1 doesn't log communication information. What is interesting though is that the M1 typically sends an out an e-mail which I did not receive, which would indicate an Internet problem. However, there wasn't one at the time because I did receive an e-mail from Homeseer which communicates with the M1. Thus, I'm lost as to where the breakdown was since I don't have any type of log information to look at. Since my wife literaly disarmed the alarm panel as the alarm just started to sound, I thought maybe the M1 took this as a cancel since the panel was disarmed within a second of the alarm being triggered. However, 18 minutes later, NextAlarm called. Anyway, I'll go finish reading the thread you mentioned. Thanks!
According to a reply to your thread, it appears that communication failures do get logged, probably at the end of all the retries. I may reduce my number of retries since technically it does matter since I'm using the ABN. Interestingly enough though, it does log every arm and disarm on NextAlarm's web site in a timely manner. A log communication log would sure be nice...
WayneW
Senior Member
Yes, failures do get logged and a trouble indication at the keypad, IF you define a failure as a total failure. If you only have one communication method, then a failure of that equals a total failure. But most central stations have multiple dial-in numbers (NextAlarm does) so I would be curious to know how often the primary number is busy or fails as one way to judge a central station's quality. And for anybody that has multiple communication methods (such as cell backup), it would be nice to know when paying for that second communication method justified itself by potentially saving your property or life.
If your ABN is your only method of communication, then I would keep your retry count fairly high (especially for the second phone number, if applicable). as there is no benefit (AFAIK) to giving up all attempts to notify your central station early (other than to switch to a backup method).
Maybe elk could add this to their serial protocol, if they don't want to add it to the logs, since I admit most non-geeky consumers would never know the difference.