Cable Free seismic acquisition premiers
6 October 2008
By Dennis Freed
September 2008 was a pivotal time for new seismic acquisition technology.
The Piceance Basin near Parachute and Rifle Colorado was the location for the introduction of a new paradigm. On this high plateau a breakthrough technology for the acquisition of seismic data was tested.
199 stations of Fairfield Industries' Z-Land Autonomous Recording Units ( ARU ) were deployed alongside an equal number of an industry standard conventionally cabled station units. Both systems simultaneously acquired the same seismic energy from precisely the same receiver locations from the same sources for a 2 week period.
Due to safety requirements source deployment was limited to daylight operations only. Additionally, due to normal deployment and troubleshooting issues, the conventional cabled system was only able to acquire data for less than half of the time available. However, the Cable Free Z-Land System was continuously recording seismic data for the entire time, 24 hours a day 7 days a week into its internal FLASH Memory with zero down time.
The newly introduced Z-Land ARU’s were able to record seismic data non-stop for the entire period with zero down time due to their innovative design. The Z-Land ARU is a completely Cable Free recording unit with all required acquisition circuitry, highly accurate clock, power, memory and sensor safely contained inside a single sealed unit. There are absolutely no cables what-so-ever extending from the ARU, so there is absolutely nothing external to the ARU that can be damaged. There is no need to deploy any radios, repeaters or beacons throughout the spread and yet the internal time base accuracy of each and every ARU is accurate to within +/- 100μsecond of UTC.
Cable Free, continuous recording and zero down time, a new age of seismic acquisition has arrived.
For more information, contact Serge Rambaud at Fairfield Industries System Sales – 281.275.7500 – or visit www.fairfieldnodal.com