Recent Advances in Skytem Receiver System Technologies

The SkyTEM system was originally designed with emphasis on mapping aquifers and their exposure to potential contaminants. This type of hydrogeophysical surveying requires a wideband receiver system in order to detect the subtle variations in early-time signal amplitude typically arising from variations in the near-surface sedimentary composition. For this reason, most SkyTEM receiver systems are capable of recording data covering a bandwidth of several hundred kHz. Recent developments in the SkyTEM receiver system further expands the achievable system bandwidth by introducing 5 MHz continuous data sampling and flexible realtime data reduction algorithms. Gate interval data are represented as polynomial coefficients, which provides more opportunities in post processing to minimise noise influence, while massively reducing the required amount of stored data. The 5 MHz sampling rate and finer signal quantization allows us to detect smaller variations in the early time signal behaviour as well as obtain system responses in unprecedented detail, which are free from implicit interpolation assumptions.