Hi all,
I am using RM for the first time to create a side scan mosaic of a seagrass bed for export into GIS for calculation of bed area. The data was collected using a Humminbird solix G3 scanning at 1200kHz.
See below:
I have found it difficult to get the tracks perfectly straight and the overlap, even after adjusting swath range, has made things a bit confusing. The transitions between each track are also clunky. The middle of each track is quite blurred where the depth offset has been applied. Do you have any tips of how I can improve this? Is there a way I can make my unit less sensitive to the boat changing direction slightly?
One thing I have tried is to crop each each track into smaller sections. I was hoping this would let me remove blurred bits and adjust depth offset on a finer resolution. When I crop the track, I find two issue arise, 1) the new cropped section has no side scan data attached to it, 2) the original track still shows the side scan data which I just dropped out. So its kind of like the track dots are removed, but the side scan image remains. Surely I am just doing this incorrectly? Any help would be appreciated.
Also, any tips of how I can improve the resolution of the sea grass bed in the mosaic. I was hoping to be able to assess patchiness and overall area, but this seems hard from this image and noticed variability in the bed shape depending on which tracks I used. The southern edge of the bed is nice, but the rest is vague, how can I improve this?
For those not familiar with the Solix G3, I can collect data in 455, 800 and 1200 kHz. The higher the frequency the more detailed the image is, but at a sacrifice of range.
I was thinking of trying to collect data at 800 kHz instead of 1200, but bump out the range of the swath to much further and conduct less tracks. Do you think this would help with my image quality?
Cheers