User Guide

Writing in progress...

Warning

Formats supported

• Kongsberg .all
• Konsgberg .kmall

Memory/speed limitations

To use Iskaffe, you need to first convert the files, and then load them in the program.

Converted files are saved on your drive, in the same location as your raw data, in a “Coffee_files” folder. You are only limited by your drive capacity here. This may take a lot of space eventually if you convert too much. But you can simply delete this folder whenever (you’ll just need to reconvert the files if you want them later).

Loading files takes up space in the live memory, so you will be limited by your machine’s capacity here about how many files you can load at a time. I’ll try to eventually provide estimates of how much data one can hope to load at a time, but you can try: if the software gets very slow or crash, that was too much! My fault for not coding with this limitation in mind, and now it will take a while to change my code to overcome this. I’ll get around to it eventually but it will take a while.

Conversion takes much longer than loading, so it’s perhaps useful to just convert everything first when you are not using the software, and then load whichever you want to look at.

Raw files tab

You convert raw data files and load them from the Raw files tab.

In the raw files tab:

• Files in $\textcolor{gray}{\textsf{normal gray}}$ are not converted yet
• Files in $\textcolor{black}{\textsf{bold black}}$ are converted but not loaded
• Files in $\textcolor{green}{\textsf{bold green}}$ are converted and loaded

You can use the “convert” button to convert files that are not converted yet, or REconvert files that are already converted (useful if you are using files that were converted with an older version of Iskaffe and thus may not be up to date with the latest software capabilities).

You can use the “load” button to load converted files

If you try to load unconverted files, Iskaffe will ask you if you want to convert them first. That’s what is described in your document currently.

Visualization

- (coverage)

Backscatter

Bathymetry

Slope

Modes

When displaying the modes, you can click on the colour bar on the right side to get a popup window for a description of each mode. A bit better to read than in the “analysis results” section.

Line Process

After clicking “Analyse”:

• The yellow stars represent soundings flagged as invalid in the system.
• Not showing on your data are “bad pings” when you have them. They show as red lines.

I am still developing this “bad pings” algo to try to be more consistent across all sonar models, but for now a ping is flagged as “bad” if:

• It has more than 10% of bad soundings, OR
• It has more than 50% of the soundings experience a drop of more than 3dB compared to the average level in the 10 previous pings.
  • This part of the algo may be tripped if the seafloor type changes perpendicular to the direction of surveying.

Since it is under development, no need to pay too much attention to this, but it will give you an estimate of the rate of weather dropouts so that could be good feedback for you and us. In my experience so far with the data I have tried, when you reach about 1% of bad pings, it usually means the conditions are quite bad for surveying. It would be good to see which number you get when you decide to stop surveying, and if those results stay consistent over time.

Survey process

All the “analyse survey” does for now is finding cells that are not covered with data within the “survey limits”. Eventually, I will get it to figure which cells have bad data too. Because the bad pings in the “line analysis” completely ignores if you have acquired good data over bad data.

Menu

Tools

These two tools allow running the “parameter change analysis” and the “line analysis” (aka % bad soundings and % bad pings) on a folder of raw data without loading them in Iskaffe, aka without overloading the memory.

So you should be able to run these tools on an unlimited number of files (provided there are no issues in the data reading and application of the algorithm).

Both tools work the same: specify the folder of raw data, specify the file to contain the results, and let run.