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The information contained in these documents is confidential, privileged and only for the information of the intended recipient and may
not be used, published or redistributed without the prior written consent of Wildlife Computers.
Figure 8—Release settings for a 12-day deployment using an external release device. The pinger is enabled.
Data Product Settings
Data products are the various types of data available from Wildlife Computers tags.
To take full advantage of the capability of the tag, great care should be taken in considering which data
products to enable and the frequency of message generation. If too many messages are generated not all
of them will be received. In this case, the result will be random gaps of time during the deployment for
which data are missing.
Many settings on the tag affect the total number of Argos messages generated. These include:
•
Enabled data products
•
Duty-cycling of enabled products
•
Sampling Interval
•
Summary Period
The combined effect of the chosen settings is shown at the bottom of the Data Products Settings section.
The number of messages generated per day and the total number of messages generated during the entire
mission are displayed. In the case of duty-cycling, two values are shown to account for the different
number of messages generated during on and off duty-cycle days. A warning is displayed when the
message total exceeds the maximum likely to be successfully received. The total number of messages
received varies depending on sea-surface conditions, satellite coverage, battery capacity, length of
deployment, and background radio interference. The average number of messages received for a standard
MiniPAT deployment is approximately 2,000 messages.
The rule of thumb is, the fewer number of messages that the tag generates, the greater the probability that
ALL generated messages will be received. Some study objectives require finer temporal resolution,
contiguous temporal coverage, and/or longer deployment durations such that a large number of messages
are generated. In these instances, one can use duty-cycling to help control when the “holes” in the data
occur.
