Overview

Hydrophone Depth Readout

Overview

The Hydrophone depth readout module can be used to read hydrophone depth information from one or more analogue depth sensors which output a voltage that changes as hydrophone depth changes.

For current loop depth sensors (which output a current proportional to depth), the current output can be passed through a small resistor create a voltage.

The system currently only works with MeasurementComputing data acquisition cards (www.mccdaq.com) but may be extended to support other devices in the future.

Time-stamped depth information is passed to the hydrophone array manager which makes it available to other PAMGuard modules as required, the information from the sensors effectively overriding the default depth information in the hydrophone array configuration dialog.

A small side panel shows a graph of recent depth history.

Depth side panel

Database output

Both the raw voltage data and the calculated depth for each sensor are written to the database. It is therefore possible to recalculate depths off-line if depth sensors are re-calibrated at any point. (PAMGuard will not currently do this for you - you’ll have to work it out for yourself using your own software).

Next: Depth Readout Configuration