NPL will hold the reference. Manchester will hold the device. Industry will hold the site. Everyone will hold their nerve when the first day is noisy.
Outputs: a measurement protocol and a short, unromantic report.
The difficulty is that a magnetometer's laboratory specification and its field performance are different quantities, and the gap between them is dominated by the environment rather than the instrument. Without traceability the field number is uninterpretable; without a real site the laboratory number is irrelevant. This collaboration exists to connect the two.
End-users are as welcome as developers, and arguably more useful. A site with a genuine survey problem — buried services, structural steel, an operational constraint — provides the conditions that no laboratory can synthesise convincingly.
How it runs
The mechanics, stated plainly.
Reference characterisation first
Each participating instrument is characterised at NPL against a primary reference, producing a traceable baseline before it goes anywhere.
Paired field campaigns
The same instrument is then deployed at a host site, with the environment characterised independently. Two days on site, typically.
Protocol development
The group iterates a measurement protocol that survives both settings, and publishes it. This is the intended durable output.
What you provide
- An instrument, or a site, or both
- For site hosts: access, a sketch of buried services, and the ability to isolate an area
- For developers: honest disclosure of the instrument's known weaknesses
- A named participant for the campaign days
What you get
- A traceable baseline characterisation of your instrument
- Field performance data, with the environment independently characterised
- A published protocol you can cite when a customer asks how you know
- An early and inexpensive answer to whether your site is workable at all
Terms
Agreed before anybody contributes anything, which is the only moment it works.
- Traceable characterisation reports belong to the instrument's owner
- Site data is anonymised as to location unless the host agrees otherwise
- The measurement protocol is published openly and freely usable
- No participant's instrument is ranked against another's in any publication