Version 1.05 01/23/2018
Omega X3: USER GUIDE
Diamond Traffic Products, Inc.
Copyright © 1991-2019 All Rights Reserved
Page 27
Situation #3, Mixed traffic Vehicles & Bicycles, and you want the Omega X3 to determine which hits on the
tube are vehicles and which are bicycles is the most complex setup.
The basic
process is:
•
Set the counter to “All/Mixed”, “Bicycle Only”, or “Vehicle Only” mode depending on
what you want to collect. Each of these modes uses the same improved sensitivity of the
“Enhanced”
mode but takes the extra step to analyze the strength along with other
characteristics of the road tube strike to determine what type of device that made the
activation.
•
Road tube length is
very critical
. The goal is to set the length so that a bicycle is not too
strong (i.e. a fast-moving bicycle hitting a road tube at 15 feet looks pretty much identical
to a car) but is not too weak so that the Omega X3 misses it. Many users come up with an
ideal road tube length.
As a place to start, set a tube at 30 feet with the bicycles and vehicles all hitting in the last
10 feet of the tube (in reference to the counter location).
•
Road tube length can, and likely will, need to be adjusted so that bicycles and vehicles are
correctly identified.
•
When in the
modes “All/Mixed”, “Bicycle Only”, and “Vehicle Only” you can tell on the
display, bicycles are displayed in inverted characters (white on black), and in Centurion
bicycles are displayed in white on green background. This helps to dial in your road tube
lengths and make sure you get the counter setup to collect data in the best way for your
sites.
Note that it is always best to put the tubes where bicycles and/or vehicles are free flowing and moving
quickly. Stop and go traffic in addition to very slow traffic is much harder to detect reliably, which makes
setting the ideal road tube length more difficult.
For specific instructions on how to setup the Omega X3 to collect data in one of the five Axle Collection
modes (Normal, Enhanced, All/Mixed, Vehicle Only, and Bicycle Only), refer to the next section. Below is a
more detailed description of each of the modes.
Normal Mode /
O.C. Input
This mode uses only hardware to detect axles from vehicles striking the tubes, or to
accept Open Collector (or “O.C.”) inputs from a remote source like a passive Infra
-Red
sensor. This mode operates the Omega X3 in exactly the same way other Diamond Traffic
counters detect axles and is especially useful for customers who are only collecting
vehicle data and do not care about bicycle detection. Normal mode does not detect
bicycles reliably but is excellent at vehicles and is also very low power in comparison to
the other collection methods.
Enhanced
This mode switches the Omega X3 from a strictly hardware detection of road tube hits to
a process called Analog to Digital (or “A/D”) conversion to detect axles. The word
“Enhanced” means that the
counter is using advanced logic and scanning the road tube
sensor at more than a thousand times per second to see if there is any activity. When a
change is detected in one “sample” of the sensor, the counter records the amount of
change in real time to i
ts internal memory (this is referred to as “capturing the signal”).
From there advanced signal processing algorithms consider the strength, width, average,
