Connecting Sonars
If you are only interested in processing data from archived files, or are just using the PAMGuard viewer to review sonar data, then you don’t need to follow the instructions below, which are only for acquiring and processing sonar data in real time.
Connecting Sonars
Read the Tritech manual !
Data from Tritech sonars are acquired over Ethernet. Generally it is best to use a separate Ethernet port to the one you use to connect your computer to the Internet. If you’re on a laptop, you’ll probably be using WiFi to connect to the Internet, so if you have an Ethernet port on your laptop, you can use that for the sonar(s). If you don’t have an Ethernet port, or are already using the port for Internet access, then purchase a USB to Ethernet adapter. These are readily available for USB3 and USB-C from many retailers.
If you’re using more than one sonar (you can have up to four) then use a USB switch to connect multiple sonars to the one Ethernet port on your computer
By default, most Ethernet adapters will try to get an Internet address from the router they are connected to. This won’t with the sonars, so you need to configure the adapter to use a fixed ip address.
The PAMGuard module cannot fully configure Tritech sonars ip addresses. You should first therefore use the Tritech Genesis software to set these up and test the sonars. Make sure that PAMGuard is not running while you do this, since only one program can connect to the sonars at a time. Follow the Tritech instructions. Once it’s working in Genesis, close Genesis and re-open PAMGuard. Apart from the ip addresses, everything else can be configured from within PAMGuard.
Troubleshooting
If you haven’t successfully connected to a sonar using Genesis, then you will not be able to connect to that sonar with PAMGuard.
If the sonars are working in Genesis, but not in PAMGuard, then it’s likely that one of three things is happening:
- You have not correctly installed the software libraries. Go back to the installation instructions and check that all libraries are in the correct folder.
- Genesis is still running, or you are running two PAMGuard with Tritech Acquisition at the same time. The Tritech software only allows one program to connect to a sonar at any one time, so check other programmes are closes.
- The firmware version (that the software on the sonars themselves) is new and currently unsupported. Contact the PAMGuard team.