At Mount Isa Mines, a system has been developed for general monitoring
of underground mobile equipment. It can provide unit condition
monitoring data such as oil pressures and motor temperatures as well as
production type information such as unit location and load. The system
does not rely on an expensive data communications infrastructure, using
instead inexpensive radio base stations which automatically transfer data
from mobile units to a surface database server on the company-wide
computer network. This paper includes a general overview of the system and a discussion
of the practical benefits it is expected to generate.