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J.4 Echo Sounders
External Sensors J
Echo-sounders are widely used to measure the depth of a body of
water at a particular point, together with such phenomena as the level
of sedimentation and the biomass (quantity of marine life). Most echo
sounders emit measurements as they are taken (typically one or more
per second).
The most common mapping application for an echo sounder is to map
the seabed, and in this case you configure the Asset Surveyor software
to log each message from the echo sounder as an
UNINTERPRETED_SENSOR_DATA record (which is not associated
with a feature).
A hypothetical echo sounder might measure the sea’s depth and
transmit this information once per second at 4800 baud, with 8 data
bits, 2 stop bits and no parity. Each measurement is emitted as a
message with the following format:
XXXX.X
where XXXX.X is the depth of the sea at the point the measurement
was taken. There are no delimiting characters that identify the start or
end of each message, so the Asset Surveyor software must rely on
timing information and the maximum length of 6 characters to isolate
each message.
TSC1 Asset Surveyor Operation Manual 415