Looks good Meggs. How do you find SonarTRX?

Just search on www.sonartrx.com I use the tool a few years now and it is great.

Matt

SonarTRX works OK. There are lots of parameters to adjust and I've had issues with the mosaic images (viewed on Google Earth) being very dark, even though they showed OK in SonarTRX. I've just started to use my TRX mosaics with Reefmaster. Next test will be to try some recordings from deeper water (30 metres) and see how it goes...

As an experiment I redid the SonarTRX mosaics (of the same reef above) using the maximum resolution available. Here is an image of the SonarTRX mosaics for this reef overlaid on Google Earth. The grid smoothing for the contours is slightly different in the Google Earth contour overlay. I haven't tried to use the high resolution mosaics in Reefmaster. The file I'm using wants to create over 66,500 tiles in Reefmaster which, on my PC, will take hours if it completes the task.

Hi Meggs,
What size is the image, in pixels?
When the image is imported into RM, it will create tiles down to 256px square, at the entire resolution (it will also create tiles at lower resolutions). RM has no idea how much of the supplied image is actually useful and creates tiles for the entire bounding box of the image. If RM wants to create 65k tiles, it sounds like your image is something over 50k px square - which is huge. If a lot of this is empty space, see if it is possible to import smaller areas in chunks which contain less empty space. This will considerably reduce the number of tiles that RM needs to create.

cheers,
Matt

Hi Matt,

You are spot on. The images are quite large and there is a lot of "wasted" space. I'll review the settings in SonarTRX and see if I can reduce the size. The SonarTRX tiles folder is over 600 MB for a half hour recording.

Obviously I am going to have to increase the number of Sonar Log recordings I do. It will make managing these files a lot easier.

Thanks for the tip.

Meggs

Hi Meggs1,

Love your mosaic overlay on RM. I must be doing something wrong, because I can't get mine to work. My recordings were done on a Humminbird and processed with SonarTRX. Would you please describe how you did yours, with file extension names? I think that is where my problem is - trying to import into RM.

Thanks.
Lou

Lou,
What file types are you generating with SonarTRX, and what file type are you trying to import into RM?
You need to create Google Earth KML or KMZ files, and import these. If you create a KML file, it will have an associated image file (or - many image files). These might be in a subdirectory. The image files must be in the same relative position as they were when you saved them, to import them into RM. Make sure you select the KML/Z file, and not the image file when importing. If you select the image file, it will be imported but not calibrated, and not tiled.
If you are getting any sort of error message - please post it up.

Matt

Hi Lou,
The kml file that Matt refers to is called "doc" and is nested under the LEI folder in My Documents. The folder structure looks like this:

My Documents
LEI
SonarTRX
Export
SonarTRX-Sonar0005-20130924-214452

I use the default SonarTRX folder/file names. The example above is using a Lowrance Sonar Log File. Your folder name should reflect the Humminbird naming convention.

Every kml file you import into Reefmaster is called "doc". This is not ideal and I've renamed one to a more meaningful name.

The image files that Matt refers to are in a folder called "files" in the date/time stamped folder.

Hope this makes sense!
Cheers,
Meggs

Hi Meggs1,

Thanks, I found the doc files where you said they would be. LEI>SonarTRX>Alder(my project lake)>Sonar TRX-R00001-R00001-20130722-103519>doc.kml. I renamed the doc.kml file as doc01.kml through doc29.kml, as there are 29 runs to cover the project area. Opened some in GE to see and they looked great.

Hi Matt,

I imported the first doc.kml file into RM. It took about 20 minutes to load as RM created 9814 tiles.
Added the file to background and nothing. Went to foreground - nothing. In global view I saw the mosaic for a few seconds before it disappeared when I zoomed in a little. Tried various opacity adjustments to both the contour map and overlay - nothing. Don't know what to do now.

Lou

PS: Matt,

The RM Reference says that "Image tiles are stored in a directory with the name TiledImages that is located in the current workspace directory". That is not showing.

Hey Lou - any chance you could upload your SonarTRX files to a fileshare service - http://www.sendspace.com/ is as good as any, and doesn't require registration before hand. If you could then send the link to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. I will take a look. I would need the whole directory sttructure of image files, as well as the kml file. It will be easier to add all of this to a zip file first - although you won't get a lot of compression with the image files.

We'll get to the bottom of it!

cheers,
Matt