Anyone use a depth finder with Carlson? I have a Supervisor tablet and a Leica TS12 robot. I'd like to rig up a kayak and set it up to take shots at intervals, and hopefully keep it all wire free (bluetooth).
Any real world anecdotes?
I have been doing bathymetric surveys since about year 2008, starting with a simple setup of just a handheld consumer grade Garmin GPSMap 76Csx for horizontal position and a Furuno LS4100 single beam sonar for depth. Vertical datum was tide level (adjusted). The first surveys were just manually logging the depth at each Garmin waypoint shot, then processing in a spreadsheet. I soon realised that the LS4100 was advanced enough to input/output NMEA data and that the Garmin could receive depth. Working out the cabling interface took a long time but I finally got it and we did many surveys with this, mainly using the autologging track of the Garmin rather than discrete waypoints. In 2013 we (civil engineering consultancy, not strictly surveyors) acquired RTK-GPS equipment, primarily to do road topo surveys for projects that we design as it is better that we do the surveying. On the controller we have SuvCE 3.0 and I figured out how to connect the LS4100 to the controller and do RTK-GPS bathymetric surveys that way. In this case I connected the LS4100 via the serial port of the controller. There is a null modem in the configuration, and I think the other important thing was to match the SurvCE logging interval to the ping rate of the sounder, in this case 2 seconds. I then bought a Lowrance sounder that has sidescan and single beam and I have set this up to bluetooth with the SurvCE controller. I have not used this on a project, but can confirm that it does work. We have Geodimeter and Trimble 5600 robotic total stations using SurvCE as well and although I have not set up our hydro equipment for it, I did think about it and concluded it should work.
