Can SP100 merge with WirelessHART?

    Oct. 2, 2007
    After a parade of speakers from the HART Board of Directors, including Peter Zornio from Emerson, Gareth Johnson and Pat Cashwell from ABB, and speakers from Siemens and Endress+Hauser strongly recommended that at the very least, ISA100 incorporate the WirelessHART standard and at best, recommended that WirelessHART be adopted as the field device portion of ISA100, SP100 chairman Wayne Manges began by leading a discussion of the differences between the proposed ISA100 and the published WirelessH...
    After a parade of speakers from the HART Board of Directors, including Peter Zornio from Emerson, Gareth Johnson and Pat Cashwell from ABB, and speakers from Siemens and Endress+Hauser strongly recommended that at the very least, ISA100 incorporate the WirelessHART standard and at best, recommended that WirelessHART be adopted as the field device portion of ISA100, SP100 chairman Wayne Manges began by leading a discussion of the differences between the proposed ISA100 and the published WirelessHART standards. Manges, to serious opposition, presented a spreadsheet he purported to be the only options to select between WirelessHART and ISA100.11a. Manges framed the discussion as a way to decide, not how, but whether to incorporate WirelessHART into ISA100. I am not very hopeful that this discussion will produce a way forward to incorporate WirelessHART. "_If_ we incorporate WirelessHART," Manges kept saying, "We will lose _this_ functionality." To this observer, this doesn't sound very promising. ...more as the meeting continues...