As one of the longest-serving employees in the business, can you tell us a bit about your time working at STR?
I started as an engineer back in 2004 and having been with the company for nearly two decades. It’s incredible to see how far we’ve come, from delivering small rental fleets to manufacturing our own products and providing critical equipment, products and services, globally to the marine sectors.
The business has experienced a tremendous amount of growth through investment in our team and technologies which has helped build a solid foundation for the business. I’ve worked within the design team since 2005 and there is a wealth of domain knowledge within our team; I believe that this is testament to STR’s culture and success.
Ultimately, engineering is about problem solving, and we have built a loyal customer base and feel they can approach us with a need to solve their technical and operational issues. A key differentiator for STR versus our competition is that we have in-house design and build capability to engineer a suite of in-house products and bespoke solutions that places us in a unique position within our market segment.
How would you say your experience contributes to the development of STR?
Over the years, I’ve been heavily involved with product design and development within STR, and it’s taught me the crucial importance of having a ‘We’ mentality in business and it pushes me to continue to drive things forward. In the subsea energy and marine science markets, you can’t get complacent, so we have to be prepared to continue to innovate and work towards developing the next disruptive cost effective product.
It’s important to remember the best solution is not always the most complex or expensive one, it's often the simplest one; my experience has taught me that efficiency and innovation are key to providing simple, cost-effective solutions.
Can you tell us a bit about STR’s current technologies?
Innovation is a core tenet of STR. We are continually looking to improve our product range and develop new solutions which can be demonstrated through the evolution of our technology and product suite.
As the portfolio of technologies grows, the systems get smaller and more efficient. Having evolved to create innovative digital communication systems, the limits of our technology have been tried, tested, and proven to work well; our range of Drop Camera Systems is a prime example of this.
Our Drop Camera Systems are powerful communication systems equipped with 21 mega pixel digital SLR Cameras interfaced with a wide range of lights, sensors and datalogger. We’ve designed and manufactured everything in-house to create these products. This allows us to fully control our supply chain, optimise cost and system performance.
From these systems, the technology that has really been developed by our team is now utilised across a wide variety of systems including many ROVs.
Since 2021 we have also been redeveloping our winch suite to advance technologies and performance, such as remote interfacing to support operations via USV/ASV vessels and improved power efficiency, safety, reliability, and performance including speed and working load limit increases.
Initially we launched the SeaTow 6000, to complement our fleet of deep water sidescan sonar (SSS) and sub-bottom profiling (SBP) systems and quickly followed up with the SeaTow 500, which is set to become our most popular winch product. SeaTow 2000 has been developed subsequently as a high speed and line-pull product to support ROTV operation and high stress loads (such as gradiometers and combine SSS & SBP applications).
Unlike other electric winches in the market, we have applied our extensive domain knowledge and operational experience to design and manufacture systems that mitigates typical performance issues relating to signal loss and data corruption caused by electromagnetic interference generated by the winch itself. This ensures not only that the system can operate reliably without compromise to the data quality of the deployed sensor, but also ensures that the sensors are able to be deployed on the very longest lengths of cables; supporting increased depth of operation, and maximising the capability of the winch and sensor as a system.How do you think these technologies will contribute to the future of the industry?
How do you think these technologies will contribute to the future of the industry?
If we create a successful product, we don’t stop there, we’re always looking at ways to improve our products and meet the changing demands of the industry.
Efficiency is key, customers are always looking at ways to reduce time, vessel cost and improve data integrity. Our engineers are equipped to think critically and break the problem down so that they can improve and evolve our products to meet industry demand and support the journey to sustainability.
What are your business growth goals and plans for the next 3-5 years e.g., technological advancements?
We are working on a variety of different products, the team at STR conduct a series of research projects to adapt our priorities and anticipate future needs.
We are working with several customers to support the integration of our winches and their associated data telemetry systems/towed sensors into new build vessels such as ASVs and USVs, which is an exciting new chapter in development as customers seek to perform more work remotely or autonomously in the immediate future.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received that has helped you progress in your career?
I believe the single most important thing to realise is that you can’t give up. Being an engineer means you must embrace problems as without them, we wouldn't be there to solve them. What I often tell entry level engineers is that if we were certain a product would pass its test, we wouldn't bother testing it - we need to accept that things don't always go to plan. We adapt, we refine, and we don't give up.
