Chesapeake Times, Vol 4 | January 2021This month some of CTI’s development resources have been focused on updating our Side Scan drawing routines to more accurately map samples to pixels in the display. These drawing routines and their accuracy become more important as users require higher and higher resolutions due to increasing accuracy of navigation, sonar equipment, and project requirements. Years ago placement of data had to be to the meter. Now we are looking at projects that require down to 10cm and sometimes lower. What’s the Problem?There are two main issues we have been focusing our efforts on. These issues are: Along track …
New Sub Bottom Reflector Digitizing Tools
Chesapeake Times, Vol 3 | October 2020 We have some new features in SonarWiz 7.7 that will assist in digitizing reflectors. The first tool is the Smart Reflector Tracking tool. It assists the user in tracing part or all of a reflector. It turns a job that used to entail many clicks into 2 clicks. Just enable the Smart Reflector Tracking tool at any time when in the Sub Bottom Digitizer Acoustic Reflector Tools by clicking the Auto-Fill button. Then the user simply sets a starting “anchor” point and an ending point. The tool then traces the reflector automatically between the 2 points. The user then …
Improved Single Beam Log File Imports
Chesapeake Times, Vol 2 | July 2020 NMEA 0183 sentences are text strings that conform to the NMEA 0183 format specification. These are most commonly used in sending data over digital serial protocol links. These sentences are human readable and can be recognized easily because they start with a “$” character and end with a “*” character. The sentences can be received by a computer and logged to a text file using anything from a simple terminal program to CTI’s Single Beam server. Here is a sample set of sentences: $GPRMC,161856.640,A,1759.40954,S, 12212.67976,E,2.000,14.7,100720,0.0,E,A*2E$GPDPT,17.8,0.0*69$GPZDA,161856.64,10,07,2020,0,0*6F The sample was generated by CTI’s NMEAWiz software. It is capable of simulating a …
Mind the Gap – in Sidescan
Chesapeake Times, Vol 7 | October 2021 The traditional sidescan system with port and starboard channel have the inherent “space” between the channels when viewing the data. Once bottom tracked, the two sides get stretched to form a filled area. However, the imagery at and close to nadir is never ideal; identifying targets are difficult, and any shadows from them would be small. Standard operation would be to run additional sidescan lines offset from the original line, with good imagery to fill in the data at the nadir area. A decent solution but one that comes with a penalty. A …
Forward Looking Sonar for Sidescan
By Chris Favreau, Program Manager We are adding support for Forward Looking Sonar (FLS) systems to SonarWiz 7.6. While the data for FLS systems look similar to other sonar systems such as Side Scan Sonar (SSS), FLS data is different and presents its own challenges. The FLS data is presented as a snapshot much like a video frame. It can be thought of as an acoustic video camera. This yields many frames per second resulting in a large amount of overlapping data. Each frame consists of multiple beams spread over the field of view (FOV). These beams have an area of …