Spill tracker developed

During a recent marine oil spill exercise at Akitio, the complexities of local currents became a small challenge for the team. Over a 'lemonade' that night, we got talking about the possibility of tracking the spill. We had most of what was needed, it was just a matter of putting the bits and pieces together.

The heart of the unit is a 'Spider' from SpiderTracks. We had one of these sitting on the shelf for an emergency or any of the team that wanted to track a 4WD or quad bike outside our regular GPS/cellular network. We bought a Pelican case, a 12V 4.0Ah battery and a cig socket.

The case naturally wanted to float on its lid so we mounted the Spider face down in the bottom of the case and the battery on top. This will make recharging simple too. Once we had the gear in the case, it was a little less likely to self right to float on the lid, so we added a metal plate into the lid. Once this was done, we couldn't force it to float the wrong way up... we needed the Spider to be either facing the sky or on its side, but not upside down.

We've left the unit running to test battery life and got 47hrs 50min with an automatic ping every 5 minutes. The Spider sends its location via satellite and we can tailor the ping rate depending on our needs from the SpiderTracks website once the unit has been deployed. We could track the location in real-time from the website.

We're not exactly sure whether the unit will track exactly the same as oil on water but we figured it will be close enough for us to know where to send the teams doing a reccy. Wind might have a little more influence on the unit - but it won't be much. The next step will be chucking the unit off a bridge and tracking it down the river - simulating throwing it from an aircraft.

One of the team here is also a marine SAR advisor... he reckons it might also be useful for search and rescue type activities too - we'd happily make it available to help out.