oce (version 0.8-9)

read.echosounder: Read an echosounder data file

Description

Read an echosounder data file, producing an object of type echosounder.

Usage

read.echosounder(file, channel=1, soundSpeed=swSoundSpeed(35,10,50),
                 tz=getOption("oceTz"), debug=getOption("oceDebug"))

Arguments

file

a connection or a character string giving the name of the file to load.

channel

sequence number of channel to extract, for multi-channel files.

soundSpeed

sound speed, in m/s. (The documents on Biosonics instruments suggest that this could be inferred from values in the file header, but test files proved this to be false.)

tz

character string indicating time zone to be assumed in the data.

debug

a flag that turns on debugging. Set to 1 to get a moderate amount of debugging information, or to 2 to get more.

Value

• An object of class "echosounder" with standard slots metadata, data and processingLog that are described in the documentation for the object echosounder-class.

Notes

• This function was written for and tested with files of type V3, and may not work properly with older Biosonics file formats.
• There are several time items in the data format, and it remains to be seen whether the one used here is appropriate.

Details

Reads a biosonics echosounder file.

References

Various echousounder instruments provided by BioSonics are described at the company website, http://www.biosonicsinc.com/. The following document

Biosonics, 2010. DT4 Data File Format Specification. BioSonics Advanced Digital Hydroacoustics. July, 2010. SOFTWARE AND ENGINEERING LIBRARY REPORT BS&E-2004-07-0009-2.0. (This document was provided to the author of this function in November 2011, which suggests that the data format was not changed since July 2010.)

See Also

The documentation for echosounder-class explains the structure of ctd objects, and also outlines the other functions dealing with them.

Examples

library(oce)
e <- read.echosounder('data.dt4')
plot(e)