The ME70 Multibeam scientific echo sounder is capable of creating beams with a user defined beam opening. The different beam openings are controlled by amplitude weighting the 800 elements of the transducer array. The weight of each element is found by multiplying the two weight arrays. This is the 20 element array of weights for the X direction and the 40 element array of weights for the Y direction.
For split beam processing a subset of the array is used. Normally this subset is set up to 70% of the total array.In this case the split beam weight set consists of a 14 and a 28 element array.
All beams in the fan use the same weighting. The two reference beams have individual array weighting. The system offers two possible ways of weight configuration. In both cases, the resulting beam opening parameters for the different beams in the fan and any reference beams are presented
in the Beam Direction Plot in the Beam Mode dialog box. Some of the parameters of the beams are the frequency for each beam, the steering angles and the current sound velocity.