Pipelines, water networks, power transmission systems, and remote production facilities are monitored and controlled by SCADA systems that many people running them were never formally trained on. The result is SCADA systems that work — until they do not.

This course teaches SCADA the way it is designed and implemented for distributed assets. It covers architecture, RTUs and field devices, telemetry, the SCADA protocols, HMI and historian, redundancy, and the security considerations specific to wide-area systems.

The work is anchored in the protocols and practices that define real SCADA: DNP3, Modbus and IEC 60870-5 for telemetry, high-performance HMI design for situational awareness, and the secure remote access discipline that wide-area systems demand.

It opens with what SCADA is, how it differs from a DCS, and where each fits, then moves into SCADA architecture: master stations, RTUs, and the communications that connect sites separated by kilometres rather than metres.

The RTU and field device lesson works through RTU-versus-PLC selection and I/O for remote sites, and the telemetry lesson covers licensed radio, cellular, satellite and fibre — the links that make wide-area control possible and constrain what it can do.

The protocols lesson covers DNP3, Modbus and IEC 60870-5, including why DNP3's reporting model suits unreliable links, followed by HMI design for SCADA using high-performance graphics and situational awareness.

Historian and reporting, redundancy and store-and-forward, and alarm management in a SCADA context are each given their own lessons — the data, resilience and notification layers that decide whether operators can trust the system.

Security and remote access is treated as a first-class topic: secure remote access, VPNs and segmentation, because a SCADA system reaching across a public network is exactly where many real incidents begin.

The course is built by a practising engineer with 15+ years delivering SCADA and telemetry on energy and infrastructure projects — including pipeline and water applications. Two case studies, pipeline SCADA with leak detection and a water and wastewater network, ground the methods, and the section project applies them to a SCADA architecture design.

If you are responsible for monitoring distributed assets and you want to design SCADA properly rather than inherit it, start with the architecture lessons and work through to the design project.