Norbit winghead sonars report their sample0 equivalent as int32 which allows for negative values. The negative value would indicate that the upper gate is closer to the head than the first actual sample.
You can see the definition for t0 on page 11 of Norbit's TN-210082 interface description for winghead multibeam echosounders (message me if you want the document).
For now my workaround is a poor one: the user gets warned that their sample0 is negative and I recast t0 as a uint32 number which is usually extremely large. This causes some downstream issues in postprocessing / visualization.
The only thing I can pitch is to redefine marine_acoustic_msgs.RawSonarImage.sample0 from uint32 to either int32 or int64.
Norbit winghead sonars report their sample0 equivalent as int32 which allows for negative values. The negative value would indicate that the upper gate is closer to the head than the first actual sample.
You can see the definition for t0 on page 11 of Norbit's TN-210082 interface description for winghead multibeam echosounders (message me if you want the document).
For now my workaround is a poor one: the user gets warned that their sample0 is negative and I recast t0 as a uint32 number which is usually extremely large. This causes some downstream issues in postprocessing / visualization.
The only thing I can pitch is to redefine marine_acoustic_msgs.RawSonarImage.sample0 from uint32 to either int32 or int64.