Terraine, Inc. has worked for years on groundwater sampling for the US Navy at a variety of sites all over the country. One particular location is the Naval Training Center in Orlando, Florida.
The Navy ran a dry cleaning operation there for decades (those uniforms don’t clean themselves) and a good deal of contaminants leaked into the local water table. Since the training center was closed, the US Navy has worked tirelessly to clean up the area and keep track of the remediation efforts undertaken by its contractors (us and our partners).
Terraine, Inc. also has a business unit that specializes in technology. Contracts like the one we work on for the US Navy are known as Firm Fixed Price. That means we quote a price for our services and that’s that. So if we have extra costs we didn’t anticipate, too bad. We don’t like that, so we are constantly looking for ways to be more efficient in the field. One way we have done that is with remote data collection. We tried several different platforms and settled on one called Adesso. We liked it so much we bought the company.
So now we and our partners use it to collect data at NTC Orlando, and many other sites.
For this sampling event we deployed Trimble Yuma tablets. These are fully operational, ruggedized touch screen computers, small enough to easily carry in the field. The ones we used are also bright yellow, which makes them easy to find in sawgrass, dirt, water and the general landscape.
There are several important reasons why we used the Yuma.
1 . Rugged – Field work is hard on equipment, especially delicate equipment, we needed a device that could take some punishment
2. Storage Capacity – We create a lot of records and take a lot of pictures. We need a device that can hold all that data and still perform 3. Battery Life – We are out in the field for 12 to 18 hours a day and we need a device that can last as long as we do. The Yuma does that.
And something else: Yumas are fast. I mean really fast. A big problem with any PDA or mobile computer is that we are so used to the speeds of our desktops and laptops. Compared to the Yuma, PDAs are slow. I mean s – l – o – w. I mean so slow that field scientists would rather write down readings on paper because it is faster.
Yuma tablets are also durable. It happens often that when you are concentrating on more than one thing, you turn around and accidentally knock over some equipment. And it breaks. We used to use standard PDAs in the field and put them in ruggedized containers and we would STILL break at least one or two every time we went out. But the Yuma can be dropped, smacked, or even hit against a well and it still keeps working.
The other big problem is that PDAs don’t have much storage capacity. If you take a few pictures or have too many records, guess what? It gets even s – l – o – w – e – r. So you have to take that into account too when you are programming for them. But the Yuma has a 32 GB hard drive. You can literally store everything in a dozen entire databases on the computer. And it’s a touch screen that doesn’t need a special stylus to use it.
Out in the field, the day starts early. It’s pretty hard to sample at night, so daylight is valuable. We start as close to dawn as possible and go all day, pretty much until we can’t see anymore. And this is another place where the Yuma really excels. The Yuma employs a dual-battery system that automatically switches when one runs out. We ran those Yuma tablets for twelve to fifteen hours and still had about 30% battery life left at the end of the day.
