No more racking your brain to remember your instrument settings or serial numbers from a field visit, and no more carrying field notebooks to capture site or deployment information. Enter your own custom field notes on the things most important to you about the deployment and site visits. Capture field technician names, location notes, deployment details, observations about fouling or other issues, and noteworthy events such as site calibrations and sonde or sensor swaps. Along with the settings, it’s all included in one formatted Deployment Report that you can reference later from any device.

The bottom line: Say goodbye to tattered field notebooks, sticky notes, and scraps of paper. VuSitu will build a file with all your notes and settings—so you can focus on the data.

The Deployment Report is visible on the VuSitu phone app and automatically backed up to HydroVu if you’re logged in. Your data and all the deployment information you need are now in one place, accessible 24/7 by all your team members from anywhere.

In-Situ tested early versions of the Deployment Report with users who know best what would be most useful to them. One of them was Rachel Hutchinson, of the Barnstable County Cooperative Extension and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Sea Grant in Massachusetts. She manages six monitoring sites in bay areas around Cape Cod, using the Aqua TROLL 600 to gather water quality data that’s primarily used by shellfish farmers, researchers studying ocean trends and processes such as acidification, state fisheries, and the general public.

The Deployment Report will help researchers like Hutchinson maintain accurate records for field instrumentation, and enable them to identify and resolve some deployment issues without having to physically return to the site.

“It’s going to be an eyeball into the deployment,” she said. “Currently we rely on either handwritten notes or physical site visits to track equipment deployment details and troubleshoot problems. The Deployment Report will save us some trips.”

Hutchinson expects that the Deployment Report will become indispensable once it’s fully implemented in her program.

“It will be a valuable piece of information that I don’t have right now.”

The monitoring sites Hutchinson oversees are intertidal, and often the time window for setting up deployments is really short. “Time is of the essence,” says Hutchinson. “How can I do this setup fast, and also make sure later that I did things correctly?”

Time saved by the convenience of the Deployment Report can help researchers stay focused on the tasks at hand.

And after the deployment, if the data from a sonde looks like there could be a problem, the Deployment Report can help researchers and tech support confirm the sonde’s settings without revisiting the site. This streamlines the troubleshooting process.

The Deployment Report is available now in VuSitu. It’s compatible with the Aqua TROLL series, Level TROLL, Rugged TROLL, RDO Blue, RDO Trio, and VuLink. Make sure you are using the latest version of VuSitu to unlock the convenience of the Deployment Report for your future deployments.