Davies Reef, which is a mid-sized reef on the mid-shelf approximately 100km east-north-east of Townsville, is our first deployment site. It was chosen because of its proximity to Townsville. It also has one of AIMS' weather stations,which provides a good base of the installation. A sensor network will be deployed at Davies reef as part of will be part of the Facility for Automated Intelligent Monitoring of Marine Systems (FAIMMS, part of IMOS). FAIMMS is being developed with more traditional measurement technologies. The ReefGrid project will develop newer technologies that can be incorporated in FAIMMS at a later date.

One of the key components of the Davies Reef deployment will be the use of  a microwave data link to allow high-speed communications to and from the reef. This link will use the "humidity duct" that sits just above the ocean to propagate the signal over the horizon. In late 2004 a successful trial was conducted of long-range microwave communications from the AIMS weather station at Davies Reef  to the shoreline adjacent to AIMS (paper). These trials confirmed the potential for low-power, long-range microwave data communications across ‘humidity ducts’ in the North Queensland region. We are now building on this trial to deploy a permanent communications link (upto 20 Mbps capacity) between AIMS and the Davies Reef weather station. The link will have the capacity to stream live video data feeds from the remote reef site – a world first.

This project is a collaboration between QCIF, AIMS, JCU, DART and UQ.