ATLAS North America Proprietary
Sea Scan ARC Scout MKII Operations Manual
1 of 1
Page: 45
Issue: 1.2.4
SCTM2-OPS
Operations Manual
SDS Packet Structure
In addition to the header a packet may have a data payload. The tag is used to describe the packet type. In
the tag's description there will be information on how and what the data is. A packet's data always follows
the header.
Each packet header must have the size, tag, and time stamp filled out. The miscellaneous storage should
be zeroed out for every packet type except for the Sync packet. The Sync packet should have the
miscellaneous storage filled with a value of 0xAA.
There are currently 13 possible values for the tag. These values are listed in the next section, Data Packet
Types. Additional data packets may be defined (if inserting your own data into the sonar data stream).
Packets that contain an invalid tag should be ignored. This can be accomplished by simply skipping over the
data payload using the dwSize variable in the packet's header. This is accomplished by the common header
format.
Built into the Sonar Data stream are a couple of mechanisms to insure the stream has valid data. The first
method, which is mentioned above, is to read only the tags that your software understands. Another
mechanism is the 8 bit checksum of the packet header that is at the end of the header. This will give the
program indication that the received packet is valid. If the checksum is bad, re-synchronizing the data
stream is required.
Skipping back and forth in the data stream can be accomplished in chunks. By using the dwSize variable
which is at the beginning of every sonar data stream packet you can rewind and skip ahead to different
sections of the data stream.
Note: that skipping ahead is only an option if the data stream is being read from a non-actively-written-to
file on disk.
7.1.3
Data Packet Types
There are 13 packet types defined in the Sonar Data Stream header file. Each of these packets has an
associated tag that is 32 bits in size. The Scout MkII uses 7 of these as indicated below.
Type
Tag
Description
Sync
0x53594E43
This tag represents a sync data packet.
This packet is sent at regular intervals
and is used to synchronize the data
stream.
Sonar V2
(SNR2)
0x32524E52
This is a sonar data packet version 2. It
stores multichannel sonar data.
Navigation
(NAV)
0x4E415600
This data packet allows the storage of
navigation data.