EQUIPMENT:  T1200-C 
PUBLICATION:  MARINEC-P-A 
  ISSUE No. & DATE:   3  02/14 
© 2014 Thorn Security Ltd      PAGE 31 of 67 
Registered Company: Thorn Security Ltd.  Registered Office: Dunhams Lane  Letchworth Garden City  Hertfordshire  SG6 1BE 
10.2.8 HOURLY STATUS MESSAGES 
Every hour, the current status of all zones in fault or disabled is transmitted, along with any general & power 
supply fault status messages. This allows for VDRs with limited recording capacity to capture the status of the 
panel in any two hour period. The hourly status will be inhibited if the VDROB loses communication with the 
panel (A ‘communication fault’ message is sent instead). 
A STATUS START message is sent at the beginning of the hourly status messages, and a STATUS END 
message is sent at the end of the hourly status messages to indicate that this is a record of current status rather 
than the actual time of the event since the VDROB has no ability to record the time of events. 
 
STATUS START & END messages: 
The Status Start message is transmitted at the beginning of the hourly status messages. Since this is not a 
fire or fault alarm condition, it uses the EVENT formatter EVE (general event messages are used to output 
detailed information about events in a safety related system in a format that can be stored but not 
necessarily understood by the VDR). 
The Status End message is transmitted at the end of the hourly status messages. 
 
The messages take the following form: 
$ttfff,hhmmss.ss,a—a,c—c*hh<CR><LF> 
$ – start of sentence 
tt – Talker Identifier = FR (Fire detection system) 
fff – Sentence Formatter = EVE (EVENT) 
, – Field Separator 
hhmmss.ss – Time of event = VDROB has no clock so set to 000000 
a—a – Tag code used for identification of source of event if applicable. 
c—c – Event description text = ##### STATUS REPORT START ##### 
* – Indicates next two characters are the checksum 
hh – Checksum (XOR of all bytes including commas but excluding $ and *) 
<CR> – Carriage Return character = HEX 0D 
<LF> – Line Feed character = HEX 0A 
 
The Start sentence is: 
$FREVE,000000,Panel01,##### STATUS REPORT START #####*63<CR><LF> 
The HEX data is: 
24 46 52 45 56 45 2C 30 30 30 30 30 30 2C 50 61 6E 65 6C 30 31 2C 23 23 23 23 
23 20 53 54 41 54 55 53 20 52 45 50 4F 52 54 20 53 54 41 52 54 20 23 23 23 23 
23 2A 36 33 0D 0A 
 
The End sentence is: 
$FREVE,000000,Panel01,##### STATUS REPORT END #####*6C<CR><LF> 
The HEX data is: 
24 46 52 45 56 45 2C 30 30 30 30 30 30 2C 50 61 6E 65 6C 30 31 2C 23 23 23 23 
23 20 53 54 41 54 55 53 20 52 45 50 4F 52 54 20 45 4E 44 20 23 23 23 23 23 2A 
36 43 0D 0A