Your Spotter has four remotely configurable modes (Waves: Standard, Waves: Partition, Waves: Spectrum, and Track) that can be transmitted by either Satellite or Cellular connection. In Waves: Standard and Waves: Spectrum modes, you can set a range of update rates to tailor your Spotter’s behavior to your specific application needs. These changes are achieved via your Spotter’s 2-way communications interface, and can be changed at any time from your Dashboard regardless of where your Spotter is in the world.
In this mode your Spotter calculates wave statistics based on a 30-minute sample period, and transmits bulk wave statistics through the satellite network (see the technical manual for more specifics on the on-board calculations of wave bulk statistics). You can select a satellite update rate of 30 minutes or 60 minutes (default). In the default setting, Spotter will include two 30-minute samples in its hourly update. The 30-minute update option can be selected if more real-time updates are required for your application, but will incur higher data usage costs.
(Note: The timestamp returned on dashboard and in the API will correspond to the end of the sampling interval.)
Figure 1: The Waves: Standard mode uses 30-minute sampling periods to calculate wave statistics. You can select either 30-minute (top) or 60-minute (bottom, default) update intervals. If the 60-minute update rate is selected, two sample periods are included in a single update to the Dashboard, which saves data transfer costs. If data updates are required faster, you can set your Spotter to send updates every 30 minutes.
(Recommended as a balance between Standard and Spectrum modes.)
In the Waves: Partition mode your Spotter calculates wave statistics based on a 1-hour sample period instead of the 30-minute sample period in the Waves: Standard mode.
In addition to the standard bulk parameters (Waves: Standard), Spotter can provide the same parameters over two ‘sea’ and ‘swell’ wave partitions (Waves: Partition).
Effectively, this means that we break up the total sea state, which is the superposition of all the waves in the wave field, in a part that is primarily forced by the local wind (the ‘sea’) and a part that is primarily decoupled from the local wind (the ‘swell’). The standard Spotter bulk parameters are calculated for the complete sea state (or the complete wave spectrum). The partitioned bulk parameters are calculated for their respective parts of the wave spectrum. We define all waves with a period shorter than 8s (.127Hz) to be part of the sea partition, and all waves with periods longer than 8s to be part of the swell partition. This is a common threshold for sea/swell separation, but admittedly somewhat arbitrary.
(Note: Currently, this is fixed, however, we plan to provide user-adjustable and self-tracking thresholds in the near future.)