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New to Marine Tools and Equipment? Start with the Basics and Necessities Like an Ultra Short Baseline

If you are not a veteran or insider to marine tech, then the term ‘ultra short baseline’ may mean nothing more to you than an image of a basketball court whose ‘baseline,’ instead of taking up the length of the court, only takes up a tiny sliver. However, in marine science terms, baseline technology is a sort of sonic-wave metric system, which allows a master computer on the surface of the ocean to track and manipulate the positioning of a remote ROV (Roving Underwater Vehicle), for the purposes of the team on land or on sea. In order to get the right calibration on your machinery, you will necessarily have to perform some maintenance and quality control while you are stationed on the shores. 

That way, you know that the baseline positioning system won’t fail or underperform once you get to the stage of putting the equipment in the water. Whether this means conducting tests on the shore (where you don’t need a massive winch to bring up equipment), or running tests in a pool or other controlled environment, you should definitely think about the equipment when you collect marine rental equipment. 

You don’t want to see a roadblock to progress which comes simply from a piece of marine equipment failing because you never tested it! 

Yes, marine science is not easy, and engaging with marine equipment is no walk in the park either. However, you can certainly get out into the oceans with gusto if you know that the vendor you are collecting your equipment from has fair-to-market prices and a track record of successfully equipping other deployments in the past.   

How to Get by in the Waters: Retrieving Your Marine Gadgets and Tech with an Umbilical Winch 

The umbilical winch can be an excellent tool for your marine or offshore expedition, for a number of reasons that in some ways have little to do with actual marine data collection. Other marine equipment is directly related to the recovering and understanding of data – for example, an acoustic doppler current profiler is a tool for seeing and predicting wave currents under the sea, and a baseline positioner is meant to track physical items in the sea or on the seafloor. The profiler helps you gain data about the movement of columns of water in the ocean, and can provide some highly sophisticated insights into your surrounding area. Also, before you rent, be sure to ask the company you are renting from about how they test their equipment, and any other protocol questions that may pertain to your equipment rental. 

You don’t need to invest in a whole spate of equipment if you don’t have the bandwidth to do multiple expeditions. 

Getting the most out of your equipment sometimes means knowing the timeframe with which you want to execute your marine data collection. If you think buying all of this advanced equipment would be premature for your business, you might want to first pursue options for marine rental equipment when you go for your items. Whether you are trying to collect samples of rocks or animals from the sea floor, or if you are looking to monitor weather and current patterns in the ocean, having a checklist of marine equipment to rent can set you up for success.