Installation tends to get treated as the trivial part of a rollout, the bit that happens after the interesting decisions have been made. On a hydraulic breaker it is closer to the opposite. The Field Unit you are fitting reads motion, which means the surface you attach it to is not a mounting point so much as the thing being measured. Get that wrong and everything downstream is faithful, precise and about the wrong object.
The principle is easy to state and easy to forget under time pressure. An accelerometer reports what the surface it is bolted to does. Fix it to something that moves independently of the tool and you will get a clean, well recorded description of that other thing. Nothing will look broken. Recorded activity will accumulate, the unit will report on its configured schedule, and the impact analysis will be quietly meaningless, which is a worse failure than an obvious one because nobody catches it for months.
On a breaker that means the upper housing: rigid, flat, part of the body that carries the firing signature, well away from the tool end, and somewhere the unit is not going to be knocked off by rock. What to avoid is anything that moves for its own reasons or comes away for service. A hose, a loose guard, a lifting eye, or a cover plate that gets removed and refitted at a slightly different angle each time will all give you data that changes character for reasons that have nothing to do with the work being done.
Fix it with screws, to a maximum of three newton metres, which is lower than most people's instinct with a driver in their hand. The figure matters: the housing is moulded nylon rather than metal, and overtightening at install is a genuine way to ruin a unit before it has recorded anything. On a percussive tool that number is the whole point, because a fixing that relies on friction rather than a fastener is being asked to hold against the one force the machine produces in quantity. If the unit has to follow an attachment that rotates between carriers, undo the screws and refit it: that takes minutes and it stays held.
Then there is the part specific to hammers, and it is the part most likely to be skipped. The unit is rated for up to 8 g of shock and vibration. That is a specification rather than a marketing figure, and it is not a promise that any given position will survive a direct hit. The upper housing of a working breaker is a genuinely violent place, well capable of exceeding the rating. This is precisely what the protective cover exists for. On most assets the cover is a sensible accessory. On a breaker it belongs in the installation rather than on a list of options to consider later.
The cover is one hundred and sixteen millimetres square against a unit of sixty eight, and it works by holding the unit between two shock absorbers so that impact and vibration reach the housing softened rather than head on. It fixes with four M8 screws on a seventy two millimetre hole pattern, torqued to a maximum of thirty newton metres and cross tightened rather than one corner at a time. The cut outs in it line up with the unit's indicator lights, so you can still read the thing after it is fitted, which matters more than it sounds when you are trying to confirm an install in the rain.
Signal is the other consideration that placement decides. The antennas for both cellular and GPS are inside the unit, so burying it deep in steel structure or tucking it underneath the machine will cost you. It need not cost you readings, because the unit holds records on board and forwards them when coverage returns, though the log keeps three hundred entries by default and a long enough gap will outrun it. What it does cost is position: fixes lean more often on cellular positioning, which is coarser, depends on the network and is not guaranteed to produce a position at all. Each transmission also works harder to get out, and since battery life is counted in transmissions, a bad location is a slow, invisible expense rather than a visible failure.
The environment itself is mostly not the problem, which is worth saying because people worry about the wrong thing. The body is nylon moulded around epoxy with no seams and no service hatches, rated IP69K for high-pressure washdowns and dust, so washing the machine is not the thing to lose sleep over. The operating temperature range is a separate specification, minus thirty to plus eighty five degrees. What kills units on breakers is impact, not weather, and impact is a mounting decision.
Finish the job before leaving site. Activation is a magnet held against the symbol on the unit for five to ten seconds, after which it takes fifteen to twenty minutes before it is properly ready. That gap is long enough that a fitter working through a list will move on and assume it worked. Confirm the asset has appeared and reported before you drive away, because the alternative is discovering it three weeks later when somebody asks why one hammer has no history.
None of this is difficult and none of it takes long. It is perhaps twenty minutes of thought spread across a fitting that would otherwise take ten, and it is the difference between a record somebody can make a servicing decision from and a shelf of well formatted noise. On a breaker in particular, the install is the measurement.