Secure and reliable

When safety is paramount in your survey and clearance operations, IT 6 offers a solution to ensure your success.

For energy: With any offshore energy development, there’s the potential to encounter unexploded ordnance (UXO). IT 6 improves the safety and efficiency of clearance operations, keeping your personnel away from risk and your project on track.

For defence: An important new addition to the MCM and underwater ordnance playbook, IT 6 helps your clearance divers and robotic platforms dispose of modern day and historical ordnance, quickly and effectively.

IT 6 is based on our field-proven Wideband 2 digital signal technology, which offers a reliable and long-range underwater wireless communications link. With IT 6, your personnel no longer need to hard wire mine neutralisers up to signal relay buoys on the surface and can set up an initiation operation in bad weather and outside of daylight hours.

Initiation Transponder 6 (IT 6) is designed to be connected directly to a remotely deployed, non-electric (NONEL) mine neutralisation device, such as a Viper from ECS Special Projects. This allows commercial and naval EOD teams to send a wireless, acoustic command from their vessel to initiate a shock tube.

It can be placed directly by a clearance diver or remotely operated vehicles (ROV). Divers and ROVs are constrained by the equipment and payload they can carry so we’ve designed IT 6 to be small and lightweight yet tough enough to withstand everyday operational situations.

With use cases from offshore renewable energy to government and defence, IT 6 transponders are suitable for high order detonation and low order deflagration scenarios.

At a glance:

• Efficient, secure, safe
• 357 mm tall by 55 mm in diameter; 0.10 kg weight in water; designed to be carried by clearance divers or small ROVs
• Controlled using IP67-rated Deck Topside and cabled acoustic dunker
• Safe: automatic time-outs, hydrostatic switch, independent circuits for acoustics and firing
• Built using 6G hardware and Wideband 2 digital signal architecture: track with our Ranger 2 family of USBL tracking systems

Built for your UXO, MCM and EOD missions

Wireless

Underwater acoustic command and control is in our DNA, so IT 6 can be considered as reliable and as secure as traditional methods involving shock tubes and a lot safer than electrical detonation lines.

Safe

Safety and simplicity are key with the IT 6 and it features several fixed and user-configurable safety features.

Firstly, the IT 6 comes complete with a hydrostatic switch, which means the unit cannot be put into an armed state when shallower than the fixed hydrostatic switch depth. If recovered back to deck, the IT 6 will also render itself impossible to arm when it goes below the minimum allowed depth.

Configurable off-deck delays and seabed timeouts mean fixed arming and firing windows can be set. The internal circuitry of the IT 6 also means that no power is applied to the independent detonation circuitry until the operator chooses to fire/initiate the NONEL output from the IT 6.

The clear housing on the IT 6 contains three status LEDs which allow the operator to quickly assess the state of the transponder and its safety. A magnetic ‘remove before use’ pin also means the IT 6 has a long operational battery life and can be powered down completely when not in use.

IT 6 is controlled using our field-proven Deck Topside system. Environmentally rated to IP67, the topside features a daylight readable 7-inch resistive touch screen, physical initiate/arm buttons and rechargeable battery – perfect for operating from small craft with no external power.

A further operational benefit of IT 6 is that its location can be tracked using any our Ranger 2 USBL systems which are installed on hundreds of energy, defence and science vessels globally.