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General Issues > Sensor

Making a Choice

From an engineer's point of view, this issue can be seen as an exchange of spatial resolution for amplitude resolution—at least if we realistically assume a limited budget. Sometimes life´s a compromise.

In order to meet the RED System‘s objectives, the sensors should be placed with a spacing of roughly 1 x 1 km throughout the densely-populated portions of the SFBA. This scheme would certainly include many sites with a considerable amount of man-made background noise.

Expressed more scientifically, we could say that super-dense instrumentation based on silicon sensors would add greatly to spatial resolution, a new paradigm in strong-motion data. At the same time, having to give up amplitude resolution––which de facto is useless at most of the urban sites––is pure logic and has nothing to do with a compromise.