Surveying in DEEPest Netherlands

Mobilised a very nice little survey vessel down near Helmond in southern Holland. The vessel has a very easy to deploy swing into place bow mount system mounted with an SEA SWATHplus 468kHz bathymetric sidescan sonar and a Valeport miniSVS sound velocity meter. Positioning is with an RTK systems, and heading/motion sensing using an IXSEA Octans.



QinSy is being used to acquire the swath data and it is working very well. This will be my first full survey using QinSy as the sole acquisition for SWATHplus so it is going to be interesting. The first learning curve is adapting the single multibeam calibration tools to works for a dual head interferometric sonar. SOme early lesson are to give QinSy around the same number of data points as it would expect from a multibeam if you want to process the data fast. We are collecting more points though for more thorough analysis and mapping when a grunt machine is available for processing.

A Busy Week

Well it has been a busy week and for the most part I have been off the grid. Saturday 19th was a pleasant day with lunch and a walk around Brisighella.
Managed to produce a nice looking mosaic with the SWATHplus sidescan data collected the previous day using CODA Mosaic, so job well done. But disaters started to happen on Sunday when Forli became fog bound and my flight back to the UK was canceled. Had to re-book a flight out of Bergamo near Milan, and take a series of trains to arrive there at 00:30 for a 7:30 flight the next day, so instead of a night out on the lash with the lads in Great Yarmouth, I had a mad rush and 4 hours sleep. Which probably is about the equivalent.
Managed to get on-site in Great Yarmouth for about 11am for a mobilisation of the MV Beaufort for GEMS. The Beaufort is an interesting vessel as it is being used into research for wind power and vessels, and flies a kite off the front deck for this purpose. As usual mobs do not go strictly to plan, but as they go this went very well with all the equipment working and interfacing well.
Had a couple of free days, just a bit of telephone support and now in Netherlands with DEEP and Seabed to survey a canal. Life is never dull

My First Field Work in Eight Weeks

The day starts early with quite an impressive sunrise over the hotel car park in Faenza giving me hope of a good day. The weather was reasonable but a bit foggy through the Po delta region on the 2 hour trek up to Chiogia. At the mob site the weather is clear and the seas calm, perhaps it will be a good day.


The vessel to be used for the survey is interesting. It is a modified sports boat where the cabin has been extended. There is a metal work superstructure which is for dual GPS antennas but also has an arm that swings out to act as a crane to help fit multi-beam echosounder to the side plate. This is it's first trip out since being fitted with a hull mounted SEA SWATHplus bathymetric sidescan sonar.
The sonar has been hull mounted to save on awkward bow mount deployments at sea. The mount is two thirds down the vessel and seems to work well. Transit speed to site was done at 15 to 18 knots and in theory you are ready to survey straight away. For this installation we did in fact use a bow mount with a SonarMite single beam echosounder and Valeport miniSVS fitted.

Being Italy and this being a very fast mobilisation and survey we had the inevitable 'spaghetti' wiring nightmare between all the equipment. The cabin is fairly compact in size so a single computer is used running both the swath software and the navigation programs, PDS2000 or QinSy, depending on the survey needs or hardware used. Both of these can run and acquire SWATHplus sonar data direct through a TCP/IP socket either on the same machine or over the ethernet. A Quad core machine was in use here with 4Gb RAM, so running swath and nav acquisition on the same machine is not an issue, although this takes away the flexibility of saving native SWATHplus raw file as disc contention will be an issue. An Applanix POS/MV , the cream of all motion sensors, was used for positioning and motion control and was feed with RTK CMR correction messages for accurate height control.

Transit to site was achieved in just under an hour, boring sea transit on calm seas with a slight swell. Moored up at an artificial island at the survey site and that is when the problems started, ranging from string decode problems (seems impossible to I/O test QinSy drivers that you build yourselves); too wiring problems. Frustrating couple of hours sorting out issues and finding best way forward to complete the survey aims, basically a fairly simple sidescan survey. Anyway proceed just using the swath software. Luckily the POS/MV calibration was complete in 3 minutes, the desk work establishing offsets and preparing a vessel config file paying off. The survey was complee in about 1.5 hours with some hairy moment close to a pipeline lay barge, or more strictly the anchor chain pattern. Having a hull mounted sidescan really works in these situations as we certainly would have lost a towed fish. Any way, managed to get back to dock with the last glimmer of the day and back to the hotel by 9pm. A 13 hour day and a qualified success, well we at least collected the data and learnt the lesson that even with preparation, something will jump out and bite you in the arse! The true essence of bathymetric blunering!

Alternative to Italian TV

Well the desktop mobilisation went well. It is a worth while exercise to try and sort out all problems you might experience on a boat in the comfort of the office and the luxury of a landline and internet connection, particularly it seems when it comes to setting up QinSy. Is it just me or does everybody feel they know more than the QinSy support people? It seems they need 2 levels of support. The dumb support line where you get somebody on the end of the line reading you the help file you have already read; and a technical support line that can actually answer your questions. Unfortunately you only seem to get the former, but maybe that is just me as I try to get help on newly introduced features and drivers, such as the SEA SWATHplus sonar. Then you try and get QinSy to do sidescan and output the results into xtf so you can process in your trusted mosaic program, such as CODA Mosaic. Anyway luckily being a beta tester of the driver you can get in the back door to the developer and get the answer, just don't try knocking at the front door with any novel questions though. Anyway, rant over, they are no worse than any number of other navigation programs; they all have their good points and their bad. But why does it always seem for the particular job you are on, that a different navigation program is best suited for it. I suppose that is where we earn our keep as surveyors and engineers, by making things work!
So after a long days work and a good Italian meal don't feel like doing much except watching TV, but the only channel in English is CNN, which grates a bit on the third re-run of the never breaking news. Luckily I can forgo the temptation of ordering Viagra or investigating the webs murkier side since Yahoo developed a good spam filter. Although I still have to run the gauntlet occasionally to check that no 'real' mail has been mis-placed.
Last night I thought I had hit the jackpot for entertainment as I remembered that the BBC has finally got its act together with a reasonable media player where you catch up on any programs you have missed on the telly or radio over the last week. Good idea except I was frustrated by the fact that it can detect that I am on the internet in Italy. It politely tells you to bugger off, the material is only for the British sitting at British computers. The whole point is that I am a Brit abroad so of course I miss their programs because I have not got access to a TV and have not got into the Slingbox revolution yet. As they would say on 'The League of Gentlemen' - "Are you local?".
Ha Ha, bright idea number 2, ITV have a similar service, only to be frustrated yet again as it also looks for foreign internet access. Both sites list DRM issues as the reason for non provision but say they are working on getting some international content on-line. Not fast enough I say, I am bored and kicking my feet now. Then I remembered reading an an article about Joost (www.joost.com), tele on the internet here and now. Guess what it works beautifully and worth it alone for the Aardmen channel, brings back memories of Vision On catching up with Morph again. Anyway I just have to sift through the 200 channels of chaff to find the other gems.
So on that note, goodnight and happy viewing!

A trip to Italy

Visiting my favourite survey company in Italy, Te.Ma. in Faenza. Unfortunately for me Ryan Air has not opened up the route to Bologna Forli yet from Birmingham, although this was announced yesterday as coming in the spring. So I had the awful trawl up to Stansted airport along the very scary A14, far too many trucks to be safe. Although the route was clear today and made good time, Stafford to Stansted in 2.5 hours, this journey is reported as 2.75 hours on Multimap. Has anybody received speed ticket yet for claims made on their blog?
Anyway Stansted was quite quiet for once so none of the horrendous queues getting through security. Ryan Air ran on time as well, I stepped off the plane exactly at the time advertised, but that the beauty of not flying from Heathrow where nothing ever runs to time!
Coming to Italy is allowing me to test out my new Skype cell phone from '3'. I am trying '3' out against my current service provider, Vodaphone, to see how they do, but also to see how well Skype works on a cell phone. Pretty good so far! I have a £12 monthly contract with 100 anytime minutes, so I make calls in UK on my Vodaphone phone to make use of the more generous free minutes. Also my main cell phone number is re-directed to the '3' number as this also uses up the free minutes on Vodaphone. This should work out well in Italy as if I stay on the local '3' network, the charges work out alot better than Vodaphone Passport, reducing those vital in country mobile costs. I have also got the advantage of there being a '3' network out here so the Skype facility works on the mobile. Skype on '3' works out fairly well, though at present it does not offer a SkypeOut service. The Skype phone is not too bad either, though being a 3G phone it is too easy to get into services you don't want to use at the press of a button, because the buttons seemed to be redefined with each press. I find this very frustrating and have gone back to a very basic phone for my main cell phone, you can only ring a number and talk on it! but apparently nowadays people don't use their cell phones to talk, they are full multi-media play things with camera and videos.
Lets hope the sidescan work goes as well as the journey and comunications. Unfortunately it looks like the weather is going to blow it out, so I will only get to do desk mobilisation and testing of equipment and define survey strategies, as I have to be back in the UK on Mondayfor a job in Great Yarmouth.

The Beginning

I came up with the idea of starting a blog a while back, but never got 'a round tuit'. So when the new year landed and the prospect of a few months without work loomed I was inspired to make a start on it. Of course, as soon as I make a start then 4 jobs come in on the same day, and luckily I was able to juggle the balls so they landed next to each other in a line. So I will be flitting back and forth between Europe and the UK providing consultancy at job start up, mobilisation and training for the next 4 weeks or there abouts. Given this I should define some terms of reference for the blog. The 'Bathymetric Blundering' is purely a reference to the mistakes I make during the course of my work. As I see it you learn from your mistakes, so with 12 years surveying with intoferometric sonars I should have a fair amount of expertise to impart. It is amazing though how many new mistakes are there to be found. People ask me how to set about doing things, wanting a definitive answer for all situations. I am still searching for that definitive answer and experience means that you usually spot your 'blunders' early enough so no damage, physical or ethereal, is done. So I will try and list troublesome survey situations, problematic hardware and general survey frustrations in this column in case anyone out there is listening/reading, but mainly as an aide memoir to myself. Hopefully it will encourage me to also start a technical support page on my main website, www.bythymetry.com.
Given that I travel alot in my work; the USA, Nigeria and China were some of the more farther flung destinations last year; the rantings here may also be in the form of a travelogue, the frustrations of a weary traveler.
Another love of mine is gadgetry, things that should make your life easier. My current obsession is with communications, trying to get cheap reliable phone contact for myself and clients delivered wherever I am. I have a number of things I am trying out at the moment which I will report on as I see how effective they are and how much they have cost me. But much like surveying, there seems not to be one single solution.
So thats about it for the moment, all I have to do now is not forget about the blog and keep it updated. A test of maintaining internet access from wherever I am posted.
Bye for now.