A trip to Korea

Invited by Insung to demonstrate the SEA SWATHplus sonar to NFRDI , the Korean fisheries research organisation near Pussan. NFRDI have their labs next door to the HaeDong YoungGung Temple. Mobilised the boat in the nearby fishing port of Daebyun .


Interesting to mobilise sonar on open fishing boats with tarpaulin shelters and dodgy installation points for the GPS and motion sensor.

Survey area was in a fisheries protected area outside the NFRDI labs a nice reef and rocky area which. Used IVS Fledermaus to image the area and plot on the local chart.

La Spezia Again

June 16th to 19th - ILRIS MC trials, Hydrographic Institute, La Spezia, Itlay

A day of Applanix POSMV training for the Hydrographic Institute on the wet pod, then 3 days of trails with the motion compensated version of the Optech ILRIS terrestrial laser scanner. This consisted of lifting the launch out of water so the 'boresighting' calibration routine for the laser scanner, sighting targets at various ranges and heights. All sensor offsets were also taken using a Total station. The trial survey, simultaneously collecting SWATHplus and ILRIS data, was undertaken on St Peters Church on a headland between Porto Venere, on the mainland and Isola Palmaria.

Oceanology 08 + dock survey

March 10th to 13th - Oceanology 08, Excel Centre, London

The premier offshore exhibition, a good chance to catch up with old friends and rivals and do some competition bashing and catch up on the gossip, maybe create some. A bit jaded as 3rd week away from home, each week in a different country. The jet lag from California got to me so a very quite conference. But at least I was boat based, running and SEA SWATHplus system with a CODA Octopus F180 position/motion system. Demos were done on the Wessex Explorer, shame the docks are about the worst environment for sonar data collection, the bottom is mush and did not give good returns.

March 26th -EGS Connaught Tunnel Survey, Royal Victoria Dock, London. Day geophysical survey close to the Excel centre and London City Airport using the Wessex Explorer.

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!

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!