Technical Data

The first consideration in the design of a seismometer installation is the quality of the site where the sensor is to be installed. The best way to determine this is deploy a sensor with very low self-noise and measure the site noise over a period of at least several months, however this is not always practical.

The following information relates to the Trillium 40 seismometer.

Currently the industry standard is the 24-bit digitizer. The discussion which follows is applicable to all well-made digitizers in this class, including the Trident and Taurus families offered at Nanometrics. As long as care has been taken to ensure good linearity and does not use gain-ranging, the performance will be essentially the same.

Choosing the right telemetry technology for your network is extremely important and there is no single technology that is right for all applications.  Several variables like path distances, terrain, link availability and licensing must be considered.
 
Another important factor is the demanding nature of seismic data communications which requires link performance to be better than 99.9%. Unlike other information which may be transmitted through email or file transfer, seismic data must be communicated continuously with the low latencies of real-time processing.  In many cases the best solution is to combine a number of technologies to achieve the required network design.