3. UHDAS Operations Guide

Note

This guide is designed for marine technicians who are operating a UHDAS installation on a ship, and for scientists sailing with UHDAS. This section does not describe the installation process, nor the setup for a ship.

An ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler) is a device made by Teledyne RD Instruments that uses the Doppler frequency shift of an acoustic ping to infer water velocity. It is a registered trade name. ADCPs are attached to moorings, lowered on CTD rosette packages, and mounted on ship hulls. This web site is about operating the shipboard ADCP acquisition system written at the University of Hawaii, called UHDAS.

“UHDAS” (University of Hawaii Data Acquisition System) acquires data from RDI ADCPs and ancillary sensors (eg. gps, gyrocompass, gps and inertial attitude sensors…) and uses CODAS processing to incrementally build a dataset of averaged, edited ocean velocities for each ADCP and ping type specified. Processed data and plots are served on the shipboard network, and daily status summaries are emailed.

Note

UHDAS is not a program, but a complex set of codes and system configurations. Setting up a new UHDAS installation requires Linux system administation skills, an understanding of UHDAS, and detailed knowledge of the particular suite of instruments and network environment on the ship. We are working to make the installation process easier and more automated, but at present it is not sufficiently documented to be done without specific training.

“VmDAS”, on the other hand, is the software provided by TRDI for data acquisition that runs on Windows operating system (UHDAS runs on a Linux OS with no need of other software acquisition as VMDAS itself).

If you are unfamilar with how and ADCP works, please visit the Teledyne R.D.Instruments website and download the ADCP (BroadBand) Practical Primer. They will ask you to create an account, but there is no cost. This outlines the underlying concepts behind how an ADCP works.

Contents:

• 3.1. UHDAS at sea
  • 3.1.1. Introduction to UHDAS at sea
  • 3.1.2. Running UHDAS at sea
• 3.2. Monitoring the System
  • 3.2.1. Monitoring at sea
  • 3.2.2. Daily Email
  • 3.2.3. Ticketing
• 3.3. Troubleshooting
  • 3.3.1. Troubleshooting Serial Feeds (beware ZMQ)
  • 3.3.2. Interpreting Accurate Heading NMEA messages
  • 3.3.3. Troubleshooting Speedlog
  • 3.3.4. NTP diagnostics
  • 3.3.5. Hopelessly Confused message
  • 3.3.6. Gui is Hung?
  • 3.3.7. Diagnostic tools
• 3.4. HOWTOs
  • 3.4.1. HOWTO talk to the ADCP (tk_terminal.py)
  • 3.4.2. HOWTO do a transducer angle calibration
  • 3.4.3. HOWTO temporarily stop email from going out
  • 3.4.4. HOWTO convert UHDAS dates
  • 3.4.5. HOWTO use only 3 beams if one is bad
• 3.5. UHDAS Computer
  • 3.5.1. Files used and created by UHDAS GUI
  • 3.5.2. Logfiles, Flags, and other status files
  • 3.5.3. Files that should be updating
  • 3.5.4. Processing and Plotting: Repeaters
  • 3.5.5. UHDAS state summary
  • 3.5.6. Configuration Files (serial logging, processing)
  • 3.5.7. Installation checklist