Seatronics invests in multibeam sonars from R2Sonic
Seatronics has invested heavily to acquire Sonic 2024 units for its bases in Aberdeen, Singapore and Abu Dhabi. Soon there will be two units available at all four of the Seatronics bases: the three just mentioned plus the base in Houston. As a further illustration of Seatronics’ commitment to this leading-edge technology, the company has been appointed the exclusive sales agent for R2Sonic in the Middle East region.David Currie, managing director of Seatronics, said, “Seatronics is determined to provide access to the best marine electronics equipment from the world’s leading suppliers. Further, we are committed to providing experienced and well-trained operators to help customers obtain the optimum performance from what are very powerful tools. The Sonic 2024 echosounder offers significant benefits over alternative equipment in terms of its performance and also its size and weight. From the point of view of our customers, its key advantage is likely to be its versatility, its ability to provide reliable and remarkably clean data under a variety of conditions, at different ranges, and in both imaging and profiling modes.”
With its 60 kHz signal bandwidth, the Sonic 2024 offers twice the resolution of other commercial sonars. Frequency of operation ranges from 200 to 400 kHz, which provides unusual flexibility in terms of trading resolution and range, and enables interference from other acoustic systems to be easily controlled.
Perhaps its most notable feature, however, is the capacity to focus the sonar beams, to narrow the spread of the beams and concentrate them all into a smaller given area. This results in more hits on the target and an enhanced image. Both the frequency and the extent of beam compression may be selected on-the-fly during survey operations.
