Abstract

From a case study focusing on surface rate behaviour of minke whales, we tracked a vhf tagged whale for 5 days in the waters south of Svalbard, Norway [1,2]. The tag was deployed with the whale-tag-launcher ARTS (Aerial Remote Tag System), and the tracking was enabled by the radio direction finder ADF setup with 4 Yagi antennas. Tag position was vital in this project due to the need of hundred percent registration of surface rate activity of the whale, and albeite to ensure good tracking. The VHF tag had a signal path of 240ppm, with 30ms signals length, which gave us 4 to 8 signals during a surfacing. The data was sampled by a custom-made voice recorder including a computer linked to a GPS and a microphone. For tagging and tracking details we refer to Kleivane et al (in prep).