Help your local archaeological society to locate and reveal the hidden mysteries of our ancestors.

The January and February 1997 issues of EPE saw the publication of Robert Beck’s Earth Resistivity Meter, an electronic tool to assist amateur archaeological societies “see beneath the soil” in their search for ruins and other hidden features.

The design presented here is based upon the same concept as used in Robert’s circuit, but it has been considerably simplified in terms of the components count and their ready-availability. Significantly, it has also been put under the command of a PIC microcontroller and provided with data logging facilities

In Part 1 last month we discussed the principles of earth resistivity monitoring and described the construction of a circuit through which this could readily be accomplished and the data stored for computer analysis. This month we detail the software that can help in this analysis, and then examine some of the soil probing techniques. The latest updates to the software are then discussed, followed by briefly considering the ethics of surveying and some practical advice and a list of further reading.