Profile

I work for a company called Sonardyne, a British sub-sea engineering and technology firm that has been pioneering and developing the most advanced underwater positioning systems in the world for nearly 50 years.  I work at the trials and training centre in Plymouth where we have 3 fully equipped vessels as well as a lab, workshop, training room and a lot of amazing kit.  Underwater vehicles, such as Remote Operating Vehicles, Automatic Underwater Vehicles, manned submersibles, need to be tracked to enable them to navigate safely…  the trouble is GPS doesn’t work underwat

er, so we use sonar.  Transponders are fitted to the vehicles and they can be used, not only to track the object, but also to send digital information between the vehicle and the surface support vessel… all using sound!  There are lots of other amazing things ours systems can do, including data acquisition and communication (underwater wifi), inertial navigation (sub-sea gyros for drones and submersibles) and intruder detection sonars but high precision sub-sea tracking is what we are principally known for.  It’s clever stuff and I get to use it in the sea off Plymouth all the time, either training customers how to “drive” the software or conducting trials and tests on new or updated technology.

Working at the Trials and Training Centre for Sonardyne means there is no such thing as a typical day.  This week for example started with showing some primary school children how to use our systems to find submerged “treasure”, the next day I was testing a new version of our subsea inertial navigation system – a highly sophisticated laser-ring gyro based sensor. After that I was delivering a lecture to the Royal Navy Hydrographic Surveyors’ course in HMS Drake, Plymouth. Later in the week I was preparing and delivering a webcast lesson to some off shore engineers in Houston Texas. Another week I could be flying off to an exotic location such as Singapore, Norway, Brazil, Mumbai or even Aberdeen to support and train our clients. And other times I will be catching up on admin… you can run but you can’t hide from paperwork!