This May we are announcing a major new initiative in Bedfordshire . We are buying over a thousand pounds of equipment ( including a significant donation from two members) to allow members to make their own full spectrum bat recordings and get a GPS location at the same time. This would allow members in Beds to make their own recordings. Those lacking the necessary sonogram expertise can return these recordings and others in the bat group can analyse them. We are using the Peersonics bat detector, but the program also accepts date for a Griffin and the Echometer touch but we will still l need to screen. them before they are added to our database.
You can find more detail here 04-5pinpoint-bat-timid
We are planning on running some sonogram workshops in April
(If you are not a member and this appeals to you, remembesr it only costs £8 a year to join)
Up until now we have been combining sonogram date and the GPS data by means of a complex spreadsheet and some sneaky use of formulae put together by Tony Aldhous
Despite this ,with the increased volume of full spectrum data gathered, this has become a time consuming process.
So in the Autumn we did a complete review of the way in which we managed data with the help of Tony, Richard Hogg and Danny Fellman. The latter undertook to write a program which could be used to do this and more.
We now have a working program which we are going to be beta testing in the following weeks. This will be a very thorough testing as Jude (the writer of this blog) is notorious for being able to find problems unpredicted by a programmer. (When still at work the computer people gave her new software to try out because if she could work it, and fool could)
The screenshot below shows the first screen
This is then worked on by the program which produces something ready for the addition of the species name, making it so much faster. There is still more to reveal, watch this space.
We are also changing the layout of the database to make splicing this data into it straightforward