Seatronics to Supply Subsea Multiplexer System

Seatronics secures £400,000 contract to supply RTS Gen 5 multiplexer (MUX) systems to Bibby Remote Intervention Ltd.

According to Seatronics, the Gen 5 is the most versatile survey multiplexer system available on the market offering unprecedented communication links and 850W of power capacity subsea.

The system enables a complete survey spread including but not limited to dual head multibeam echosounder, sidescan sonar and sub bottom profiler, inertial navigation system, 2D real time sonar and up to 3 HD cameras all to be run over one single mode fibre simply with the addition of a 110vac power supply from the remote operated vehicle (ROV). Additional features such as PPS timing subsea and diagnostics on each channel with a 3000m rated titanium bottle as standard made this the ideal choice for BRIL’s requirements.

The first two systems are already in operation onboard the Toisa Warrior where they are being employed to provide a 2.5Gbps link per HD channel for a high definition camera inspection of a caisson for BRIL’s client Nexen UK.
 
Mark Wood, operations director, Bibby Remote Intervention, said, “This is a significant purchase. I am convinced that the new multiplexers will help us get the most from our fleet of work class ROV’s.”
 
Phil Middleton, operations manager, Seatronics Ltd., added, “We are delighted to be supporting and working with BRIL in supplying the Gen 5 Multiplexers enabling their growing fleet of ROV’s to interface the very latest range of survey instruments to perform duties including pipeline, platform and subsea structure inspection and construction support.”

(In digital signal processing, the multiplexer (often abbreviated to mux or muldex) takes several separate digital data streams and combines them together into one data stream of a higher data rate. This allows multiple data streams to be carried from one place to another over one physical link, which saves cost).