Recording System
HD utilizes the Fairfield Nodal ZLand V2 recording system. The ZLand is a true nodal wireless system. Our nodes are all in one units with absolutely no wires or external geophones or external batteries. Other “wireless” recording systems eliminate the traditional seismic cables but often you still have wire in the geophones, and with many wireless systems external batteries. Anytime you have wires and connections you have potential failure points due to animal chews, water infiltration, corrosion, etc. The ZLand all in one design eliminates these failure prone points and is the least intrusive design there is.
The nodes can be completely buried if need be for working in high culture areas. We have total freedom in survey designs and can place nodes virtually anywhere. Landowners do not have to look at miles of cables running everywhere and we have no issues crossing highways, rivers, train tracks, no permit areas, etc.
The nodes contain DT-Solo “hot” geophones which give an equivalent output to a traditional string of six geophones. Recording at 1 millisecond in continuous mode (24 hours a day) nodes can run for up to 30 days at time before the battery goes dead or the data storage is full. This makes our system ideal for passive or monitoring surveys as well.
Another huge advantage of our system is that there is zero trouble shooting which means that the nodes are deployed and then do not have to be revisited until it is time to pick them up after recording. This greatly reduces the environmental impact vs a cabled system where receiver lines are constantly traveled down to replace chewed cables, damaged geophones, batteries, etc. On a recent trip with 1,493 node deployments we successfully recovered data from all but three nodes for 0.2% dead traces. With a cabled system ten times as many dead traces would be considered good.
