After 11 painful weeks back home again.
It was nice working Oman again, what wasn’t nice was having to put up with IO’s dreaded Scorpion ‘recording’ system.
They should really drop this thing. It has no future. Hardly a day went by without it crashing at least once, often 3 or 4 times.
The ground electronics are heavy and unreliable, the central recording unit bulky and unreliable and the software of course as mentioned before
seems to have been written by 10 year olds. The log files generated border on worthless – there isn’t one file that can be relied on to be accurate, and IO can’t even spell – see here an extract from the header of one of their APS files:
H00 SPS FORMAT VERSION NUMBER
H01 DESCRIPTION OF SURVEY AREA
H02 DATE OF SURVEY
H03 CLIENT
H04 GEOPHYSICAL CONTRACTOR
H05 POSITIONING CONTRACTOR
H06 POS. PROC. CONTRACTOR
H07 FIELD COOMPUTER SYSTEM(S)
H08 COORDINATE LOCATION
H09 OFFSET FROM COORDINATE LOC
H10 CLOCK TIME W.R.T. GMT
H11 SPARE
H12 GEODETIC DATAUM, -SPHEROID Unknown 08 CLARKE 1880
H13 SPARE
H14 GEODETIC DATAUM PARAMETERS
H15 SPARE
H16 SPARE
H17 VERTICAL DATAUM DESCRIPTION MSL-mean sea level
Pretty sad that a technology company can’t even spell computer! Even worse when you consider that this and many other things were pointed out to them nearly a year ago. Sercel can rest easy, the Scorpion is not going to challenge them. What is worrying is IO’s purchase of ARAM. I just hope that the ideas and organisation flow from ARAM to IO and not the reverse.
On the good side though was 6 new AHV-IV vibrators. These are very nice machines, probably the best vibrator on the market today. Miles ahead of Sercel’s Nomad.
If only IO would leave the instrumentation side to Sercel and Sercel leave the mechanical side to IO.