Gear Fund Grant Awarded
Announcement
We are pleased to announce that the Fishing Gear Location Marking Fund has selected Ropeless Systems as a grant recipient! The project, “Implementation and Testing of the FONTUS Protocol”, will utilize Ropeless Systems’ Ropeless RISER™ MTA to prototype the proposed protocol which was developed by a team from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in cooperation with NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center.
About the Fund
The Fishing Gear Location Marking Fund is designed to encourage research and development of innovative commercial solutions that enable the location of fixed fishing gear on the sea floor (e.g., pot and trap gear) to be discovered by gear owners, other fishermen and fisheries, law enforcement, and fishery regulators without the use of buoy lines and buoys. The Fund is dedicated to the development of interoperable solutions for gear location marking so that different manufacturers’ devices can communicate with one another.
About Ropeless RISER™
Ropeless Systems, Inc. designs, manufactures, and sells ropeless fishing gear. Our products support the ability of fixed-gear fishermen to fish without the need for buoys and endlines. This simultaneously eliminates the entanglement risk posed by vertical line, while permitting fishing in closed and restricted areas.
Ropeless Systems’ products employ “lift bag” technology for the retrieval of gear from the seafloor. Stored compressed gas is utilized to fill the lift bag and generate buoyancy (lift). The gas fill is initiated by a high-pressure solenoid valve controlled by an electronic circuit referred to as the “actuator”. Initially these employed passive acoustic or timer initiation, but because these actuators were developed for other (non-fishing) needs, they did not have all the features and capabilities required for on-demand fishing. Ropeless Systems subsequently developed a new actuator that employed bi-directional acoustic signaling to not only initiate the recovery function, but also allow for seafloor positioning and gear conflict resolution. This configuration employs a Surface Transceiver integrated with a chartplotter and the Transponder-Actuators attached to gear on the seafloor. The original passive actuators are referred to as RISER™ AT (Acoustic/Timer) and the new bi-directional acoustic actuators are referred to as RISER™ MTA (Multi-code Transponder Actuator).
