A new toy: acoustic doppler profiler (ADP)

Heard of a remote controlled boat (similar in size to a model boat) that can effortless plot your river's cross-sectional area (depth, width all included)? I have and I even found out that PUB has just such a toy. How exciting! Determining the dimensions of water channels for water quality modelling will be a zilch.

Heard of how expectations tend to blind us to reality? The model sized boat turned out to be kayak sized behemoth (ok, I am exaggerating) that does not move on its own power and needs to towed. Bye bye remote control. Furthermore, this behemoth has a draft of 20-30cm and a blind zone of ~20cm upwards from the channel bed. ~ half a metre of depth without data! Why does anyone want to use this thing?


It turned out that some researchers have been using this toy to map the Marina Reservoir (dammed up by Marina Barrage). Since the depth is typically several metres, half a metre of blind zone is acceptable (?).

You probabaly can guess it by now. This toy is not for me. My water channels are too shallow, I don't have a motor boat to drag this thing (can I drag it by muscle strength?) and the software is kind of buggy. Still, I have provided a photo here of the toy in case you are thrilled to use this thing.