Planet Ocean has become the UK and Ireland distributor for American-based SeaView Systems’ new low power wave height and direction sensor.

The SVS-603 sensor is a low powered system that reports heading,significant wave height and dominant wave period. As well as dominant wavedirection, maximum wave height and maximum period via RS-232.

Dr Tim Crandle of SeaView Systems, said: "The SVS-603exploits the latest semiconductor advances to offer significant improvements insize, power consumption, and configurability.”

“We are excited to work with Planet Ocean and leverage theirconsiderable experience to introduce the SeaView SVS-603 to the many newapplications enabled by these improvements."

The system is flexible and under user control via a simplecommand set allowing selection of sample rates and periods, output data format,and logger functions.

Planet Ocean will be offering a packaged version, μ-Wave-II inan IP-67 enclosure with wet pluggable connectors and will also be launching aline of value added variants to utilise the product.

This will include systems with GPS positioning and optionalinputs for external sensors such as wind speed and direction, water quality anda choice of telemetry. These aim to enable existing navigational bouys to beconverted into full blown wave or data buoys with web-based data access.

Terry Sloane, Planet Ocean’s MD, concluded: “Because of theextremely low power requirements and wide operating voltage range of thistechnology we can implant this into small platforms that traditionally couldnot carry the battery and solar panel requirements of last generation sensors.”

By Jake Frith

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