This month's speaker will be Dale Ruckman, Southwest Regional Manager for StoneL Corporation, a manufacturer of both conventional and field bus enabled valve communication devices, field bus I/O modules, and "Field Link" network connection solutions.  Today's process industries are rapidly migrating towards bus technologies.  As a result, one of the biggest challenges facing end users today is which bus technology or protocol offers the best solution for their particular plant or application.  In fact, many applications are actually a multi-bus solution.

Dale will give a brief overview of the more prominent protocols being used today, their strengths and weaknesses, how they interface with other protocols in a multi-bus environment, how the emerging "harardous area protection concepts" relate to bus networking, and references for all of the above for future study.