How can you offer such competitive prices in comparison with other buoy manufacturers?
SouthTEK has benefited from lean manufacturing techniques from the automotive industry. The same technology and production processes driving your car are also implemented to manufacture our buoys. This strategy concentrates all efforts in quality control and the elimination of any cost not adding value to the product.
What does it mean transmission and position sampling?
Position sampling means to get a position from the GNSS (i.e. GPS, GLONASS, COPERNICO…) and store it in the memory of the buoy. Transmission is sending this position (or positions) from the buoy to the Internet so that it become available to the user through the LD Manager. You may want to operate the buoy with position sampling and transmission at successive steps; for instance, each hour the buoy samples the position and transmits it. Alternatively, you may want to sample several positions before transmission; for example, the buoy samples the position every 15 minutes and transmit (the four positions) every hour.
What is the difference between Offshore and Coastal Nomads?
Offshore Nomad communicate to internet through Iridium constellation. Therefore, there is no geographical limitation for their operation; they can be used at any point on earth, from pole to pole. However, the communication cost of Iridium are not low and need to be arranged to suit the customer needs.
Coastal Nomads communicate through the GPRS network. We typically provide the Coastal Nomads with communications covered for two years at no cost for the customer. However, since Coastal Nomad rely on the network serving mobile communications, they can only operate in the coast where this coverage exists.
What is the Search Mode?
To recover an Offshore Nomad operating in the ocean is an equilibrium between the frequency at which you would like to know the position (as high as feasible) and the cost you want to have for the Iridium communications (as low as feasible). The Search Mode is designed to reach that equilibrium. It allows a progressive increase of the position and transmission frequency as the vessel approach the buoy to be recovered. For instance, an Offshore Nomad operating at a sampling and transmission rate of one hour is difficult to recover. Through the Search Mode you may increase progressively the frequency to 30, 20, 10,… minutes as the vessel is at 15, 10, 5,… miles from the buoy.
We strongly recommend no to configure the Offshore Nomad with a long period of high sampling and transmission frequency. The cost in Iridium communications is high.
Where can I buy your products?
We operate both as direct sellers and through a network of national reseller. If your country has a reseller please contact them, otherwise you can write us at the email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
In case you may want to become one of our reseller, please contact us and we will study a potential partnership.
What are the costs of operating the buoys?
Coastal Nomads are typically provided with two years of communications at no extra costs. Offshore Nomad operate through Iridium, we design a plan for each customers that exactly suits his/her needs. You can check the section World Wide Service in our web to check these costs or contact us and we will be happy to attend you.
What is LD Manager?
LD Manager is the software that operates and configure the buoys. It is provided for free together with our products. LD Manager fully operates over the Internet so that no installation is needed, access to Internet and common navigators is enough to operate LD Manager. With this program you can very easily change the sampling and transmission rates, activate the search mode, see the position of your buoy in Google Map, download data,…