Side Scan Sonar for BR2 - DeepVision vs Starfish 453 OEM?

General Discussion
1

Guys

I am looking at adding a Side Scan Sonar on my BR2 to do archeological search and wondering if anybody had done it and has any feedback.

Most of the work happens at a depth between 50 and 300 meters from a small boat and I don’t have a positioning system on the ROV. The objects I will be looking for varies greatly from football size to a whole shipwreck. I am mostly looking at a few use cases:

  1. Using the SSS to save time in getting the ROV on a wreck or site for which coordinates are known or somewhat known but due to current and time spent descending, getting the ROV on the site becomes time consuming or just extremely difficult. I have missed wrecks 200 feet long in 100 meters of water or risked getting stuck in them just because I had no idea where the wreck was and what its orientation was with respect to the ROV.

  2. Doing bottom search in a small area around a know site at depth between 80-250 meters where traditional SSS are not very effective or easy to maneuver and using an ROV could save a lot of time. I realize that without a proper positioning system this is hard but there could be some benefits.

  3. Possibly doing search of larger areas towing the ROV from a boat at low speed and using GPS on the boat for estimating position of the ROV given speed and tether length.

I am currently considering the DeepVision kit and the Starfish 453 OEM kit which are both around the same price. It seems the Deepvision kit will be easier to integrate and could be stretched past its 100m rating. However I am new to this so looking for feedback from someone that has done it already.

Thank you all!

2

I haved uesed DeepVision kit on BR2.It is easy to assemble it on BR2. The Official has a video to test the DeepVision.But I can not get the effect .

3

For the money I would look.at getting a small sector scanning sonar. The data out of the side scan is going to be odd looking without position data.