Your First Survey

Here will be a walkthrough of how to conduct a simple survey, assuming no prior knowledge. The guide will be vessel agnostic. This is a WIP.

Choosing Conditions

Although the unit compensates for pitch, roll, and yaw, better results will be achievable in calmer conditions.

Transect Planning

The swath width (field of view) of the Surveyor 240 directly correlates with water depth. Shallow water requires close transect spacing. Larger transect spacing can be used in deeper water. For this reason, try to plan your transects to travel along depth contours.

For a quick estimate, take the shallowest water depth you plan to encounter and multiply by 0.7. If the water is 10m deep, start with 7m spacing.

A more accurate transect spacing can be calculated given the water depth and the desired overlap percentage using the following:

S = (1-(P/100)) * (D * 1.5) 

S = Spacing
P = Percent Ovelap
D = Water Depth 

Example:

In ~10m deep water, with 40% overlap desired between passes:

S = (1-(40/100)) * (10m * 1.5) 
S = 9m

Speeds

0.6 m/s to 2m/s is the envelope that the Surveyor 240-16 has been tested in. Slower boat speeds will acquire more points for a given area.

With a small surface vessel in choppy water, better results are achieved by increasing the boat speed to generate lift on the bow and flow over the keel / rudder.

Ping rate

Surveyor 240-16 can run up to 20pps in shallow water, this is useful for generating the highest possible resolution point cloud. This will also double the amount of storage and bandwidth required.

The ping rate can be lowered to reduce point cloud density and file sizes.