Series: Reading the Receiver: What Are the Arrows Really Telling You?

by Allan Williams, Training Development Manager | GeoPoint Academy

Directional arrows are probably one of the easiest receiver features for a new locator to understand.

Arrow left? Move left. Arrow right? Move right. As the arrows begin to center, it feels like you’re getting closer to the conductor.

That simplicity is also why I’m careful about when I teach technicians to rely on them.

I want the technician to first establish confidence that the signal is clean.

That means paying attention to the Peak response, comparing it with Null, watching how the signal behaves and recognizing whether anything suggests distortion.

Once the technician is confident in the signal, directional arrows can be very useful. They can make tracing easier and help with pinpointing, especially when the utility is deeper and the Peak response becomes broader.

The problem comes when the arrows become the first thing the technician trusts.

A newer locator can quickly become comfortable watching them and reacting to them. After enough successful locates in clean conditions, it can be easy to assume that centered arrows automatically mean everything is correct.

That assumption can become a problem when the signal is distorted.

There is another reason technicians should understand the arrows on the receiver they are using.

Different manufacturers do not necessarily use them the same way.

For example, Radiodetection’s RD8200e Peak+ mode can use either Guidance arrows or Null arrows. Those two options are giving the technician different types of directional information.

Vivax-Metrotech’s vLoc3 series also offers Peak with Arrows. If the directional indication and the Peak response do not agree, that disagreement can be an indication that the field is distorted.

So a technician can move from one receiver to another, see familiar-looking arrows and assume they work the same way.

They may not.

That is why I want technicians to understand what the arrows represent on the particular receiver they are using.

Once you are confident that the signal is clean, arrows can be an excellent tool.

But getting to that point requires understanding the rest of the information the receiver is giving you first.