La Spezia

Feb 25th to 29th - La Spezia, Italy - Hydrographic Institute training

5 days training SEA SWATHplus to the Naval
Hydrographic Institute. This consisted of using both bow and pole mounts on the hydrographic launches. The system was bought with a wet pod Applanix POSMV, but unfortunately this had not arrived so undertook training using the on-board Seatex Seapath 200 system. It was interesting to discover that the hydrographic officers were very well trained and new all the theory of good data collection and best practice, patch testing etc. BUT had never measured a vessel offset, you never know what new things you will be teaching!

Catching Up

I have had a busy couple of weeks and finding it is difficult keeping up a daily blog when only on the grid for short periods when on the move, email and keeping my busy life organised taking precedent. It also doesn't help having an aversion to writing but as the blog is meant to be therapy for this I need to make the effort of covering the last two weeks, so here goes...

Frustrating few days surveying the canals in southern Holland. The main problem was with the positioning system, RTK sucks sometime. The main problem is that GSM modems were in use as the conditions and distances from the base station precluded radio modems. So the problem with the GSM modems is the data channel is squeezed out in times of high mobile usage, so thats lunch times, when school gets out,when works out, get the picture. So if your survey is using RTK exclusively for height control then your stuck waiting for the corrections. Guess what, when there is bandwidth then the constellation is wrong as there was to much masking in certain quarters by vegetation at the base station. When everything else was working then we were surveying in an urban corridor, under power cables, or under bridges, and RTK took ages to re-initialise on the rover. Its at times like this you wish you had an Applanix POSMV, its inertial system would take care of the under bridge and powerline outages.You could also use POSPac post processed RTK solution, that way you could work even during modem outages, you just have to remember to record POSPac data on the boat, RINEX at the base station.
Bailed out of the Dutch job early, being a consultant I never really get to see a job through, just the bits that don't work; but that is the fun, getting things to work and making sure the job goes well. Anyway the next job beckons, desk training on the SWATHplus system to the engineers at Seatronics for 3 days, basic bread and butter stuff...

Seems like I am an incompetent blogger, as this entry seem to have been hidden for about 4 months.. ouch has it been that long, aversion to writing possibly going to kill this off, but I have some interesting trips coming up so resurrecting the blog for another push.