What Sensors Work on a VISTA-20P?

The Honeywell VISTA-20P supports normally closed and normally open wired devices. There are 8 wired zones on the panel itself and it supports up to 48 wired zones. This system also supports up to 40 wireless security sensors. The 5800 Series RF devices will require a compatible RF receiver.

The VISTA-20P can land 8 hardwired zones onto the main system board. The system supports an additional 40 zones which can be hardwired zones or wireless zones. To add additional wired zones to the system, you will need to install a 4219 zone expander or you can zone double using included resistors. Zone doubling offers a way to add 7 wired zones to the board without any expanders. Each zone expander adds an additional 8 zones. These will support normally open (NO) and normally closed (NC) devices depending on how you wire the resistor. NC devices are the most common and the resistor should wired in series on one leg. Normally open devices should have the resistor strapped across the data terminals in parallel. True line supervision requires that these are connected at the end of line at the peripheral sensor. However it will work if wired at the panel just will not be truly supervised for line cuts.

A normally closed security device is one that rests in a normally closed state. A door or window sensor is a normally closed device. When the door or window is closed, the system will see the zone as “ok”. When the door or window opens, the switch in the wired sensor will open and the system will see the zone as being faulted. A normally open device works in the opposite way. A smoke detector is a good example of a normally open device. The smoke detector will sit in a normally open state and then close its loop when it detects smoke. The system will understand this as the smoke zone going into a fault and trigger the appropriate alarm assuming programming is correct. Any wired terminal on the system or a 4219 zone expander can be configured to be a normally closed or normally open zone.

To add wireless zones to the system a compatible receiver must be installed. A very popular receiver is the 6160RF. This is an alphanumeric keypad that has a 5800 transceiver built into the unit. This device lets you enroll as many 5800 wireless devices as the system can handle (up to 40 RF zones for the VISTA-20P). If a user does not want to install a keypad, they are able to install a standalone wireless receiver like the 5881ENH. This wires directly to ECP keypad bus and the antennas stick out of the top of the metal cabinet that houses the panel.