Exploration Consultants Limited (ECL) has announced the first release of its new SPS data manipulation and QC system, Vega. The system was developed in Perth from product design and specification criteria offered from ECL's global network of office and field based seismic data acquisition and processing consultants.

Paul Miller, who headed the product development team, said, "ECL is very proud of the latest addition to our suite of QC software. It has already received extremely pleasing feedback from those of our consultants who have used it in the field on 3D land and shallow marine surveys."

One case in point was, according to Miller, the Fletcher Challenge Energy Pohokura 3D transition zone survey, recently completed in Taranaki, New Zealand. This survey, acquired by Grant Geophysical (transition zone) and WesternGeco (offshore), was technically challenging as the transition zone consisted of shallow reef and solid cliff faces. There was also a combination of rough seas to contend with offshore and a mixture of intensive dairy farming and a methanol plant onshore. The planning and positioning of receiver lines and even individual shot locations needed to be meticulously examined to ensure that the best possible fold coverage was achieved, despite the obstacles.

"For the most part", explained Miller, "GMG's Mesa system was used for the survey design and binning analysis, proving very capable for the task. However, Mesa is not an inexpensive piece of software. ECL's Vega system was still under development during the survey period, nearing completion at the same time as the FCE survey was also being wrapped up. Mick Small, ECL's acquisition consultant contracted to project manage and quality control the acquisition phase, had the opportunity to test Vega's binning and SPS analysis capabilities against Mesa at this time.

"The results of the comparison were very pleasing. Vega not only duplicated the binning displays generated by Mesa, it did so very quickly and easily. The Vega user interface was intuitive and the bin grid setup was extremely simple, even without prior knowledge of the survey parameters. Not only that, Vega offered the additional features of SPS data and format checking, enabling each swath’s SPS file set to be automatically and thoroughly checked against the SEG published format standard as well as the survey's contractually stipulated parameters, such as source and receiver separation distance limits." Vega also allowed Mick to move and delete single or multiple source or receiver points and assess the impact on fold coverage. This feature is further enhanced by Vega's ability to load raster image files, geographically register the image and then overlay the SPS points.

Although Vega is not a full survey design package it does not come at a survey design package price either. At less than US$3000 it can be seen that Vega is an extremely affordable, feature packed system that should have an excellent future for both field and office based 2D and 3D survey quality control and analysis. Vega is being sold or leased through ECL's new e-commerce enabled online store at www.ecqc.com.