Fair enough. I’ve noted that internally, but it’s not something we currently have a target timeline for.
The profile messages from the Ping Sonar are for response strengths (to the transmitted pings), not raw acoustic measurements. The ADC samples the vibrations of the transducer (i.e. acoustic measurements), then there’s processing of that signal to get from “several sound wave samples” over a period of time into “one response strength measurement” representing a datapoint within the profile. The number of sound wave samples per profile datapoint changes depending on the profile_data_length and the currently configured profile.scan_length and speed_of_sound.
I’m not sure what the deal is with the offset Patrick mentioned - I assume that’s not something that would change between pings, but I’ll ask to confirm.
Assuming the offset is constant, if your priority is just making the profiles comparable (rather than getting a conversion to a physical unit of sound intensity), then if you turn off “auto” mode each profile datapoint should have the same scaling and number of ADC samples, at the cost of needing to set reasonable values for the gain and scan range by yourself. If the samples per datapoint number isn’t important (I’m presuming the strengths are time-averaged anyway, although that may be incorrect) then you could keep auto mode on and use the profile.gain_setting values (which are already provided in the profile messages) to scale the profile datapoints into some form of comparable ‘power’ estimate.