The VQ-580 provides high speed, non-contact data acquisition using a narrow near-infrared laser beam and a fast line scanning mechanism and was especially designed to measure on snow and ice. 

Riegl USA is proud to announce a new addition to the V-line Airborne Laser fleet of instruments that Riegl Laser Measurement Systems GmbH has released, the VQ-580. The VQ-580 provides high speed, non-contact data acquisition using a narrow near-infrared laser beam and a fast line scanning mechanism and was especially designed to measure on snow and ice. High-accuracy laser ranging is based on Riegl's unique echo digitization and online waveform processing, which allows achieving superior measurement results even under adverse atmospheric conditions, and the evaluation of multiple target echoes.  The main applications for the Riegl VQ-580 are glacier and snowfield mapping, along with, agriculture and forestry mapping, topography and mining, lakeside and riverbank mapping, corridor mapping, city modeling and mapping of power lines.

The Riegl VQ-580 is, mountable in any orientation, even under limited space conditions on helicopters or UAVs. This compact and lightweight instrument needs only one power supply and provides line scan data via the integrated LAN-TCP/IP interface. The binary data stream can easily be decoded by user-designed software making use of the available software library RiVLib.

The scanning mechanism is based on a fast rotating multi-facet polygonal mirror, which provides fully linear, unidirectional and parallel scan lines.