Access Control Systems in Oman, supplied and installed

Access control systems in Oman, for gates and vehicles

Most companies selling access control in Oman are selling door access. Fingerprint readers, attendance terminals and card readers on office doors. That is a different trade from ours.

We do the access control that opens a gate. Remotes, keypads, card and tag readers, long range vehicle readers, intercoms and loop detectors, wired directly into the operator or barrier controller by the same engineers who fitted it. There is no second contractor and no argument about whose wiring is at fault when something stops working.

The six ways to open a gate

Choosing between them is mostly a question of who is arriving and how often.

Remote handsets

The default, and still the right answer for a villa. Two are included with every gate we install, and extra handsets start at around OMR 6. Simple, reliable, and easily lost, which is why anywhere with more than a handful of users usually wants something else as well.

Keypads

A code instead of a device. Useful when several people need access and nobody wants to carry anything, and useful for a code you can give a delivery driver and change afterwards. Choose a metal keypad rather than plastic for anywhere in direct sun, because plastic keypads in Oman go brittle and the printing fades off the keys within a couple of summers.

Card and tag readers

RFID cards or key fobs presented to a reader. Right for a compound, a staff car park or a small office where each person needs their own credential and lost cards need cancelling individually. The driver still has to lower a window and reach out, which is the limitation.

Long range UHF readers

A windscreen tag read from several metres away, so the barrier is already rising as the vehicle approaches. Nobody stops, nobody opens a window, nobody handles anything. This is the correct answer for any entrance where vehicles queue, and it is what we fitted with a CAME GARD GT8 at an industrial yard in Rusayl.

It is the single biggest improvement you can make to a busy commercial entrance, and almost nobody in Oman offers it as part of the gate rather than as a separate security project.

Intercoms

Audio or video at the gate, answered from inside the house or from a phone. The right answer when the question is not just whether to open the gate but who is asking.

Phone control

A module on the control board that lets the gate be opened from an app. Genuinely useful for letting a driver or a guest in while you are not at home. Cheaper to include when the gate is installed than to add afterwards.

Vehicle access control and parking

For car parks, compounds and industrial yards, access control is usually a system rather than a single device. A barrier, a reader on the entry side, a loop detector buried in the road surface to hold the arm up while a vehicle passes and to prevent it dropping on a bonnet, and often a second reader or a free exit loop on the way out.

We supply and commission all of it as one job, including the barrier itself. Boom barriers from three to six metres, loop detectors, readers, credentials and the wiring between them.

Choosing for Oman rather than for a catalogue

Two things decide whether an access control installation still works in its third year here, and neither appears in a manufacturer’s brochure.

• Sun on the reader. A keypad or reader mounted on a west facing pillar takes direct afternoon sun at well over 45 degrees. Metal housings and a shaded mounting position are worth more than a longer warranty.
• Dust on the lens and the contacts. Blown sand gets into card readers and intercom buttons. Sealed units rated for outdoor use are not an upgrade here, they are the minimum specification.

Supplied from Al Khuwair, fitted anywhere in Oman

Stock is held at our shop in Al Khuwair, Muscat, and we install across all eleven governorates. Because we fit the gates and the barriers as well as the access control, everything is commissioned together and warrantied together.

If you are specifying an entrance and are not sure which method suits it, tell us how many vehicles or people use it in a day and we will tell you honestly what it needs. Often the answer is cheaper than what you were about to buy.