Advice needed on navigation tracking with sonar

[Elliott1940]

Hello - thank you for accepting me into the forum! My name is Elliott and i'm based in the UK. My question is related to searching a body of water with side scan sonar. I hope I have posted it in the right place, and even the right forum but since so many contributors here will be very tech savvy i'm sure there will be a lot of good advice.

I want to search a body of water with a sonar yo build up a map of the bed and look for interesting objects on the sea floor. The software I have with my sonar is pretty basic and will show a good picture of the sea floor, but will not give any information on a map. So I would plan to use it with a GPS mouse plugged into my laptop and a separate navigation/mapping program.

I want to do this in such a way that I know where I have already searched, so I do not miss any of the bed and do not go over the same place twice. Using sonar to search for underwater objects is termed 'mowing the lawn'. The boat will go back and forth, back and forth etc. until the area is covered completely. I would plan to leave 10-20m between search tracks so nothing is missed. My understanding is that I need navigation tracking software for this, and I would like to run this on a laptop. Ultimately I would like a program that helps me build up an overlay of the area searched, on top of an existing map.

Can anyone advise me how best to do this please? I am looking for an inexpensive if possible!



Thank you

Elliott

 

[Nuvi-Nebie]

The cheapest way of doing what you want would probably to purchase a GPS logger (trackers are for determing the position of an object remotely), you can get a logger such as the GT-730 FL USB GPS Receiver for around £40 (UK pounds), this device can plug into a laptop for power but will store up to 250,000 waypoints internally so there would be no need for any software on the laptop. The *.GPX files from such a device can be viewed using free software such as Garmin Basecamp or (when converted to *.KLM file format ) viewed on Google Earth

If you own a smartphone you can install a free App. which will log a GPS track in *.GPX format and display it on you phone's screen, or as detailed above

 

[Elliott1940]

Thanks a lot Nuvi-Nebie

Thats really helpful. Is there a way of watching my progress in real time on a laptop as well?

 

[Nuvi-Nebie]

The GT-730 does say it will send live position data to GPS mapping programs (although it isn't supplied with any as far as I can see), HERE is a list of some software that might be compatible - although it is quite old