Product overview
Built for airborne geophysical surveying, the GTK-R15 combines a MEMS-based chip-scale rubidium atomic optically pumped magnetometer with a three-component fluxgate magnetometer, GPS, a laser altimeter, a nine-axis attitude sensor and a barometric altimeter. Hardware and software communications are integrated with the CW-15 flight platform. The system includes a miniature multichannel acquisition unit with a 24-bit high-speed ADC, a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor running at 1.2GHz and USB data storage. Its navigation receiver supports GPS and BeiDou with 2m accuracy.
Windows ground-station software provides aeromagnetic data recording, post-flight cleaning, analysis and compensation parameter calculation. The optically pumped magnetometer compensation algorithm uses three vector components as attitude factors to remove aircraft permanent, induced and eddy-current magnetic fields from the total field. Its 18 coefficients are estimated from preliminary four-sided flight data collected in a magnetically smooth area as far above the ground as possible. The stored coefficients are then applied to data collected during subsequent survey flights. Fluxgate processing uses 12-parameter digital compensation.
The typical total-field interference improvement ratio is 10-20 times, varying with the flight platform and decreasing in systems with less interference. The optically pumped magnetometer operates from -30°C to +60°C and requires no calibration. At 5V, its probe and frequency counter consume 2 W during operation and 3W at startup. The probe measures 19x19x47 mm and weighs 18 g; the frequency counter weighs 100g, with connecting cables excluded from both weight figures. The fluxgate magnetometer has a ±100μT measurement range and a 15-minute warm-up time.