In-field QC of a land node seismic system

The land node (also called wireless or cableless) seismic acquisition revolution hit North America in 2008–2009 and very quickly proved to be a technical and economic success. The rationale for the choice to use wireless rather than cable systems has been presented in numerous publications and venues (e.g., Caldwell, 2010; Mougenot et al., 2014; Munoz et al., 2015; Uribe et al., 2016; Yates et al., 2016; Dean et al., 2018), so suffice it to say that increased productivity, reduced costs, comparable or better data quality, and reduced health, safety, and environmental (HSE) risks have catalyzed its acceptance by the industry, particularly in North America, but also in Europe. Furthermore, the wireless systems are evolving to address what some have perceived as the inherent weaknesses of these systems: the inability to provide sufficient information in real-time about the status of the live spread of receiver stations, and to deliver in real-time substantial amounts of seismic data. It has taken longer for wireless systems to make significant inroads in other places in the world outside of North America, but that has been in the process of changing over the last few years. One place in particular where that has been changing is South America. In a geographic area where seismic activity has not been that strong over the last 5–6 years, at least 23 seismic surveys (9 2D and 14 3D) have been acquired since the beginning of 2011 using wireless acquisition systems. This paper describes how quality checking (QC) during acquisition operations was accomplished for a node system (Geospace GSX) used to acquire two 3D surveys by SAExploration for Hocol in Colombia in 2016 and 2017.