In the past, selecting the “Capture Contact” button on the SonarWiz map toolbar, then clicking on a contact on the plan view, would always bring up the waterfall digitizer for the file selected and scroll to the area clicked on, for subsequent contact picking.
There were some reasons for this behavior, as the digitizer often allowed a significantly better view of the target area, and after-the-fact contact edit options were limited. With subsequent plan view drawing and contact editing improvements, though, this restriction has become mostly unnecessary, so people have been asking for it to be dropped.
In the upcoming SonarWiz 7.09, there’s a new option available to control this behavior. To see it, select the Options entry in the quick access toolbar near the top left of the SonarWiz main screen, then select the Contact Options page:
Note the new “Open digitizer when contact is digitized on plan view” entry near the bottom right. By default, this will be checked, to mimic the prior behavior of always opening the digitizer. Unchecked, though, will allow for quick contact picking directly on the plan view.
The “Open contact editor..” option just below will function as before, regardless of whether the digitizer is shown.
Contacts picked this way will still be associated with a sidescan, bathymetry, or backscatter line, just as contacts picked from a waterfall. For the initial implementation, contacts are picked against the top file in the Z-order; future improvements may allow for file selection or a hotkey to enable picking on overlapped files.
– Jonathan Fleetwood, Engineer