Chesapeake Times, Vol 13 | April 2023
In the upcoming version of SonarWiz, 7.11.0, we’ve made a number of additional improvements to SonarWiz’s realtime and recording behavior and setup. Much of this involves moving options from not-obvious locations to a centralized location, though a few new features deserve mention as well.
On the general realtime page of the application preferences window, options can now be set for various non-recording aspects of realtime setups. Some of these were moved from other preferences pages. These include drawing options for navigation plotting and screen centering, alarms for disk space and off-course navigation, and interactions with external programs (SonarWiz servers and the helm display).
One item here not brought from another preferences page is the input geodesy. This option is new in 7.11, to accomodate servers (the EdgeTech eBOSS server at first) that are capable of providing positioning in coordinate reference systems other than WGS 84 latitude/longitude. CSF files created from such sources will have their input geodesy set to the value here, and original coordinates the source is providing will be treated as such. See article by David Finlayson in this issue for what that means.
The recording page has options specific to the recording operations. These include recording locations and file naming options, as well as some SegY, XTF, and CSF options that were previously located in windows otherwise dedicated to import settings.
Options for automatic file splitting also appear on this page, with a couple new options: splitting on time and position jumps. These handle the case where an external system unknown to SonarWiz can cause pinging to stop, then restart it later and/or at a new position. Prior versions of SonarWiz would continue recording the same line, resulting in the first ping after data restarts to stretch onscreen for an unreasonable distance.
Lastly, we’ve sped up some drawing and related functions that were taking up a substantial portion of the sidescan and sub-bottom recording runtime. Testing for the eBOSS system unveiled some sluggishness in the realtime drawing; subsequent fixes have much improved performance for sidescan and sub-bottom recording, by half or more in many cases.