What are the major differences between your Sonar Viewer program and Reefmaster? Is Sonar Viewer another version of Reefmaster that's a "lighter" version than the Lite version? Are there any capabilities that the Sonar Viewer program has that the Reefmaster program doesn't?

Hmm..... Thought this would be easy one. The main reason I'm wondering is the Reefmaster demo seems to run fine on my computer, but Sonar Viewer crashes when I select a sonar file to view and I'd like to know if I'm missing out on something.

The Sonar Viewer is "just" a single file sonar viewer - you can load a single sonar log and view it, and also view sidescan data over a map view. There are some simple waypoint features (load, edit and save).

ReefMaster offers many more features, including creating contour maps from log data, creating sidescan mosaics using multiple log files (with the Sidescan Mosaic module) as well as a sonar viewer.

The sonar viewer uses some new graphics features that have not yet been implemented in ReefMaster. These use the graphics card directly, and require a "reasonably" modern GPU in order to work (DirectX 10.1, which has been available/fairly standard since about 2008). The reason that the sonar viewer did not work on your computer is likely because of this. If you want to confirm this, then please run the dxdiag program (open up the task manager and enter "dxdiag" after clicking menu option File/Run new task). If you click the "Save all information" in the dxdiag app and then send the resulting file to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. I can take a look and see if your system is compatible.

Hi Matt, i started Sonar Viewer trial, it is normal i can't save my own options for brightness, contrast, colour palette and noise reduction ?
It's 'couse it's a trial ? every time i start sonar viewer i've to adjust everything back again
Thank you

Hi Avek,
At the moment this is by design - we took some feedback during the beta testing phase and decided not to persist these settings. We've since had a bit of feedback from users that they would like this feature, so we will add it in an update soon. We're yet to decide on whether to persist settings per track, or globally - any input on this is welcomed.
Matt

Hi Matt. I know we have discussed this via email but to perhaps stimulate some further discussion here I thought I would copy & paste some of the relevant points regarding persistent settings in Sonar Viewer here. I hope that's OK with you. If you feel it's not appropriate then please delete this post.

Jeffc
"If you are looking for some user feedback regarding further improvements for the next upgrade, might I suggest you start with allowing the user to set some user defaults, such as the panel sizes and positions (and which channels are displayed in each), whether waypoint labels are on or off, whether SRC is on or off and the palettes selected for each channel.

These are things that once set are not usually changed often and at the moment it is a bit of a pain having to reset them each time the program is opened. Maybe even brightness and contrast settings for each channel, although they do change frequently. Rather than have a whole new configuration screen, perhaps each setting could just be made “sticky” and default to the last used setting."

Matt
"When the SV was in beta we stored all parameters on a per-file basis, with last used settings "sticky" for newly opened files. User feedback was that it was too much, and easy to muck settings up so we went with per-session instead. Perhaps sticky settings with a "restore defaults" button might be a decent compromise."

I think your suggestion of making the settings mentioned above sticky with a restore defaults button would be ideal. I would like to see them made persistent globally rather than on a per track basis. As stated, these are things that once set are not usually changed often.