Raptor FTEM™ | Airborne Time Domain Electromagnetics
The Raptor FTEM is the most capable airborne TDEM survey system available. Dual-frequency acquisition resolves geological targets that competing systems cannot detect, across mineral exploration, groundwater mapping, oil and gas, and environmental programs worldwide.
Explore ApplicationsAirborne time domain electromagnetics maps subsurface geology by measuring how the earth responds to a pulsed magnetic field. A helicopter tows a transmitter coil that fires a current pulse into the ground, inducing eddy currents in conductive materials below. When the transmitter switches off, those currents decay and generate a secondary field that receiver coils measure continuously. The rate and shape of that decay encodes the electrical resistivity of everything beneath the flight path, from the near surface down to several hundred metres. Processed through inversion, the result is a continuous 3D resistivity model of the survey area, acquired at helicopter speed across terrain a ground crew could not traverse in weeks.
Transmit pulse · eddy current induction · secondary field measurement · resistivity inversion
A helicopter-borne system covers ground in days that a field crew could not walk in weeks. Remote, rugged, and inaccessible terrain presents no barrier.
AEM produces a 3D resistivity model of the entire survey block, from near surface to several hundred metres depth.
Geophysically defined priority targets reduce the number and cost of boreholes required and improve the return on intrusive investigation programs.
What airborne TEM can map:
Airborne TEM is deployed across a wide range of industries wherever large-area subsurface characterisation has direct economic, regulatory, or safety value. The Raptor FTEM is designed to perform across all of them.
Airborne TEM is the standard reconnaissance tool for base metals, nickel-copper sulfides, cobalt, and critical minerals. It ranks targets rapidly across large ground holdings, maps ore system geometry beneath cover sequences, and defines drill programs from data that would take years to acquire on foot. The Raptor's 600 A transmitter and 1 MHz receiver bandwidth detect conductors at depths and spatial scales that conventional systems cannot resolve.
State and federal water agencies, groundwater sustainability programs, and irrigation authorities use AEM to map aquifer geometry, depth to bedrock, paleochannel systems, and saline intrusion at basin scale. The method is increasingly mandated under groundwater management frameworks in Australia, the United States, and Scandinavia. The Raptor's dual-frequency acquisition provides near-surface and deep aquifer data simultaneously in a single pass.
Exploration companies use airborne EM ahead of seismic acquisition to map shallow resistivity hazards, characterise basin structure, and build near-surface velocity models in areas where ground access is limited. In frontier and remote terrain, AEM provides regional geological context that materially reduces the risk of seismic and drilling programs before significant capital is committed.
Environmental consultants and government agencies deploy AEM to delineate contamination plumes, characterise landfill and mine waste sites, map geotechnical hazards including quick clay and dissolution features, and support remediation programs requiring large-area subsurface coverage. The Raptor's 3-metre horizontal resolution and three-axis reception produce datasets precise enough to direct targeted intrusive investigation and reduce overall site characterisation cost.
Accutem's AI powered processing pipeline captures every measurement in a synchronised archive: EM response, magnetic field, navigation, altitude, and environmental data. Nothing is discarded in the field. Surveys can be reprocessed years later as inversion algorithms improve, extracting value from the dataset long after flying. For long-term monitoring programs, baseline surveys flown today remain fully comparable with future repeat acquisitions.
The Raptor operates without an on-board helicopter operator, reducing per-hour costs and opening terrain that is impractical or unsafe for manned aircraft. Planned Starlink integration will allow a single ground team to supervise multiple aircraft simultaneously from anywhere in the world, extending the range of operable survey areas and reducing mobilisation costs for remote programs.
Every subsystem on the Raptor was designed and built in-house. That is the only way to reach these performance numbers. Off-the-shelf components impose hard limits on transmitter current, receiver bandwidth, and system size. The Raptor discards all of those limits.
Every competing system transmits at a fixed frequency, which forces a choice between near-surface resolution and deep penetration. The Raptor transmitter is fully software-defined across 15 to 330 Hz. In dual-frequency mode, it acquires simultaneous shallow and deep data in a single pass, eliminating the need for separate survey campaigns at different configurations. Pulse shape, duration, and base frequency are all configurable for each survey area without any hardware changes.
The Raptor's receive coils are wound using a proprietary technique on ultra-low-loss radar-dome-grade materials. The resulting receiver coil bandwidth is 1 MHz, roughly 20 times the ~50 kHz typical of competing systems. That bandwidth advantage is what allows the Raptor to record both the earliest time gates (shallow, fast-decaying targets) and the latest time gates (deep conductors) in the same pass. Narrowband receivers physically cannot capture the early-time data needed to resolve shallow geology.
600 A peak transmit current is double the approximately 300 A of conventional competing platforms. This is achieved through fully custom in-house electronics, not a larger system footprint. More current means a stronger primary field, deeper penetration, and a better signal-to-noise ratio at the late time gates that indicate deep conductors.
In dual-frequency mode, the Raptor samples every 3.0 meters along the flight line, up to 8x denser than industry-standard dual-moment systems operating at nominal airspeed. Narrow conductors, structural offsets, and discrete high-grade targets that fall between sample points in a conventional survey are fully resolved in the Raptor dataset.
Many competing airborne EM system record only the vertical (Z) component of the electromagnetic response. The Raptor carries orthogonal X, Y, and Z receive coils simultaneously. Three-axis data provides conductor geometry information that Z-axis measurements cannot supply: the dip and strike of conductors, separation of overlapping responses, and far better discrimination between ore bodies and geological noise.
Motion-induced noise is one of the primary limits on airborne EM data quality. The Raptor addresses it at the source. An IMU and dual-antenna GPS co-located on the bird capture heading, pitch, roll, and 3D position continuously. These feed physics-based noise cancellation algorithms that remove motion artifacts while preserving fine-scale geological responses, unlike low-pass filters that smear the target signature.
Raptor FTEM Technical Specifications
| Parameter | Raptor FTEM |
|---|---|
| Peak Transmit Current | 600 A |
| Receiver Coil Bandwidth | 1 MHz |
| TEM Base Frequency Range | 15 to 330 Hz, fully programmable |
| TEM Modes | Single Frequency / Dual Pulse / Dual Frequency |
| Horizontal Resolution (Dual-Freq mode) | 3.0 m |
| Receive Coil Axes | X, Y, Z (3-axis orthogonal) |
| ADC Sampling | 550 kHz, 24-bit |
| Data Packet Rate | 100 ms / 10 Hz |
| Magnetometer Sample Rate | 1,000 Hz |
| Motion Compensation | On-bird IMU + dual-antenna GPS, physics-based noise cancellation |
| Data Recording | Full waveform, all channels (X, Y, Z, TXI), GPS, inertial, altimeter, power-line monitor |
| AFMAG / Earth Field Cancellation | Yes, simultaneous with TEM acquisition |
| Helicopter Operation | Unmanned, no on-board operator required |
| Electronics Architecture | Fully in-house, custom FPGA-based DAS |
| Processing Pipeline | Python / C, AI-assisted inversion and QC |
| IP Protection | Multiple patent-pending innovations; FPGA firmware and signal processing maintained as trade secrets |
Accutem Inc. (USA) and Advanced Geophysics Inc. (AGI, Canada) are the development and commercialization partnership behind the Raptor FTEM. Accutem leads systems integration, commercialization, and the U.S. market. AGI drives electronics R&D, FPGA architecture, and data acquisition system engineering.
The Raptor is a ground-up redesign. Every core subsystem, from the transmitter electronics to the receiver coils to the data acquisition hardware, is designed and manufactured in-house. This is not a common approach in the industry, and it is exactly why the Raptor's specifications are possible. Multiple patent-pending innovations protect the dual-frequency acquisition architecture, broadband receiver coil design, and processing pipeline. FPGA firmware and signal processing IP are maintained as trade secrets.
Contact us to discuss a survey program, system availability, or equipment rental.
Airborne TEM is the standard tool for large-scale mineral targeting. The question is whether your system can find what is actually there. The Raptor can.
Mineral exploration companies use airborne electromagnetic surveys to cover large areas quickly, map geological structure, and identify conductive targets before committing to expensive drilling. A well-executed AEM program can define years of drill targets in weeks of flying. The challenge is that most ore bodies worth finding today are buried beneath cover sequences, weathered rock, or conductive overburden where older, lower-power systems cannot see clearly. That is precisely where the Raptor is designed to work.
The 1 MHz receiver coil bandwidth and 600 A transmitter give the Raptor access to both the earliest time gates (shallow, fast-decaying conductors in conductive overburden) and the latest time gates (deep resistive hosts with discrete conductors) simultaneously. Narrowband systems miss early-time data entirely. If your current survey dataset was acquired with a conventional 50 kHz system, there is a real possibility that shallow conductors were not detected.
At 3-meter horizontal sampling in dual-frequency mode, the Raptor produces conductor outlines precise enough to design drill collars directly from the geophysics. Standard industry systems sample every 25 to 27 meters, an 8-fold difference. For narrow vein systems, steeply dipping conductors, or structurally controlled deposits, this spatial resolution advantage directly affects drill success rate.
All competing systems record only the Z (vertical) component. The Raptor's orthogonal X, Y, and Z coils collect data that constrains conductor geometry in three dimensions. Dip, strike, and depth estimates from X/Y/Z inversion are substantially more reliable than those derived from Z-alone measurements, which reduces the risk of drilling in the wrong orientation.
At 1,000 Hz and 30 m/s survey speed, the Raptor records a magnetic measurement every 0.03 meters. Competing platforms record every 1 to 3 meters. The resulting structural maps and magnetic inversion products reveal alteration halos, intrusive contacts, and fault patterns relevant to gold, copper, nickel, and PGM systems at spatial scales that conventional magnetic surveys cannot resolve.
Unmanned helicopter operation reduces operating cost in remote terrain and removes crew exposure risk in steep or hazardous areas. The compact bird footprint improves low-altitude handling in mountainous country. For programs in the Canadian Shield, northern Australia, the Andes, or other technically demanding environments, these operational advantages translate directly to more line-kilometres flown per day and lower program cost.
The Raptor archives the complete raw measurement record from every channel. As inversion algorithms and AI-assisted processing techniques improve over the life of an exploration program, the dataset can be reprocessed to extract additional information without re-flying. For programs with a multi-year exploration horizon, this archival data value is a real and distinct benefit.
Demand for nickel, cobalt, lithium, copper, and rare earths is growing faster than near-surface inventory can supply. The next generation of critical mineral discoveries is expected to come from increasing depths, beneath cover sequences that have been historically underexplored because conventional survey systems lacked the transmitter power and receiver sensitivity to see through them. Airborne TDEM surveys are particularly effective at identifying conductive targets associated with nickel-copper sulfide deposits, lithium brines, graphite, and other critical minerals hidden beneath sediment or glacial cover. The Raptor's specifications were built specifically for this problem.
Airborne EM provides fast, cost-effective subsurface information that makes seismic programs smarter and reduces the risk on exploration wells.
Seismic is the backbone of oil and gas exploration, but it is expensive, slow in rugged terrain, and tells you relatively little about the shallow section. Airborne electromagnetics fills in the picture. EM surveys map resistivity structure across large areas quickly, providing basin-scale geological context, shallow hazard information, and velocity inputs that make seismic interpretation more reliable. In remote or difficult terrain where seismic acquisition is impractical, EM is often the only cost-effective tool for early-stage exploration reconnaissance.
A regional AEM survey gives exploration teams a resistivity framework for the basin before committing to seismic acquisition. Fault systems, basement topography, and sedimentary layer boundaries are mapped quickly across large areas, allowing seismic lines to be designed more strategically and expensive re-shoots to be avoided.
Near-surface resistivity from airborne TEM can be converted to seismic velocity using well log relationships, providing a shallow velocity field for static corrections that improves imaging of deeper targets. The Raptor's high-frequency shallow imaging resolves thin near-surface units relevant to both hazard assessment and velocity modelling.
In frontier basins where seismic data is sparse and terrain makes acquisition difficult, airborne EM provides a fast first look at basin structure. Combined with magnetics, it maps the depth to basement, major fault systems, and broad variations in lithology that define the prospective fairway before any drilling commitment is made.
Regulators in many jurisdictions require operators to identify and protect potable water aquifers before commencing drilling. Airborne TEM is the most efficient way to map the shallow groundwater system across a lease area, satisfying regulatory requirements while generating useful data for well design and drilling fluid programs.
The Raptor operates without an on-board helicopter operator. In the remote basins where frontier exploration takes place, this reduces logistics cost and removes crew exposure risk. Planned Starlink integration will allow ground-based supervision of multiple aircraft from a single operations centre, regardless of where the surveys are flying.
Active hydrocarbon seepage can produce resistivity and radiometric anomalies detectable from the air. The Raptor's high-resolution magnetic and EM data, combined with LIDAR integration, provides a multi-sensor dataset for seepage mapping that supports geochemical follow-up programs in areas with structural traps identified from seismic.
Between 310,000 and 800,000 undocumented orphaned oil and gas wells are estimated to exist across the United States. Unplugged, they leak methane and create pathways for groundwater contamination. Detection and remediation is a federal environmental priority: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 provides $4.677 billion through 2030 for orphaned well programs, and the DOE has an additional $30 million in appropriated budget. Orphaned wells are strong targets for the Raptor specifically. They are shallow, ferrous, and electromagnetically distinct, scattered across large areas. The Raptor's 1,000 Hz magnetic gradiometers, LIDAR, and 3-meter resolution allow individual wells to be identified and located at survey speeds that make large-area government programs economically viable.
Airborne EM is the most cost-effective way to characterize aquifer systems across large areas. It reduces the number of wells needed and puts them in the right places.
Groundwater management is one of the fastest-growing applications for airborne electromagnetic surveys. Aquifer systems are complex, laterally variable, and difficult to characterize with drilling alone. A single borehole is a point measurement. Airborne TEM produces a continuous resistivity image of the subsurface across the entire survey area, mapping aquifer depth, thickness, lateral extent, and water quality variations in a way that no practical number of wells can replicate. State and federal water management frameworks, including California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, are increasingly requiring AEM surveys as part of basin characterization programs.
TEM data resolves the resistivity contrasts between alluvial sediments, clay aquitards, and bedrock that define aquifer geometry. A Raptor survey maps aquifer depth and thickness continuously across the flight grid, providing the hydrogeological framework that well programs need to design optimally. Studies have shown that AEM-guided well programs can reduce the number of holes required by up to 50% compared to drilling without geophysical context.
Some of the most productive aquifers are hosted in buried paleochannels that have no surface expression. They are notoriously difficult to locate by drilling. Airborne TEM images the resistivity contrast between coarse channel fill and surrounding fine-grained sediments at depths of tens to hundreds of meters, routinely identifying productive aquifer targets that drilling-only programs miss entirely.
The resistivity contrast between fresh and saline groundwater is one of the strongest signals in TEM data. The Raptor maps the freshwater-saline interface continuously across coastal aquifer systems, providing the spatial framework for monitoring saltwater intrusion, managing coastal pumping programs, and satisfying regulatory requirements for water quality protection.
Sustainable groundwater management requires knowing where recharge occurs. AEM data maps the near-surface geology that controls infiltration, identifies permeable pathways connecting surface and subsurface, and distinguishes recharge zones from discharge areas. This information supports managed aquifer recharge programs and informs land use decisions in water-stressed basins.
The Raptor's dual-frequency architecture provides coverage from shallow alluvial aquifers to deep confined systems in a single pass. Programs that would otherwise require two separate surveys at different transmitter configurations can be completed with one flight program, reducing cost and program duration while producing a more internally consistent dataset.
State and federal groundwater programs, from California's SGMA basin characterization surveys to USGS regional mapping, have defined data quality standards for AEM surveys. The Raptor's FPGA-based data acquisition system, on-bird IMU noise cancellation, and full-waveform archiving produce datasets that meet the most demanding technical specifications.
Traditional aquifer characterization relies on drilling a grid of boreholes, running geophysical logs, and interpolating between sparse data points. Airborne TEM surveys cost a fraction of equivalent drill coverage while producing continuous data across the entire area. The standard workflow is to fly the AEM survey first, use the resistivity model to identify optimal well locations, and then drill targeted confirmation holes. This sequence reduces total program cost and produces a better conceptual model than drilling alone. AEM is now considered standard practice for regional aquifer characterization, municipal well field siting, and agricultural groundwater management programs worldwide.
Large-area subsurface characterization without drilling. The Raptor covers in days what ground-based methods take months to complete.
Environmental investigations and geotechnical programs share a common problem: the subsurface is variable, the area of interest is large, and intrusive investigation is expensive. Airborne TEM solves the scale problem. A single survey program can characterize the subsurface across an entire site, watershed, or region, providing the geological and hydrogeological framework that guides where to drill, where to sample, and where contamination has or has not migrated. It does this without ground access, at a fraction of the cost of drilling-led characterization, and with data that meets regulatory requirements in most jurisdictions.
Conductive leachate plumes, ionic contaminants, and saline intrusion all produce measurable resistivity anomalies in TEM data. The Raptor's three-axis (X, Y, Z) receivers provide conductor geometry information that Z-only systems cannot supply, enabling more precise delineation of plume boundaries, migration direction, and depth without requiring ground access to the site.
AEM surveys define waste cell boundaries, leachate migration patterns, and the subsurface geology controlling contaminant transport across large landfill sites without intrusive investigation in active disposal areas. This is valuable both for initial site characterization and for monitoring programs tracking changes in leachate distribution over time.
Airborne TEM maps quick clay zones, soft sediment layers, dissolution features, and other geotechnical hazards across large areas rapidly. Studies in Scandinavia have used helicopter TEM to map quick clay distributions relevant to slope stability and infrastructure planning, identifying hazard zones that would be impractical to locate by drilling alone. AEM can reduce the number of geotechnical boreholes required by directing them to the highest-priority locations.
Near-surface dissolution and void formation produce resistivity anomalies detectable in high-frequency TEM data. The Raptor's high-frequency shallow imaging capability, combined with 3-meter horizontal sampling, identifies anomalous zones at the spatial scale relevant to infrastructure safety assessments, well ahead of the surface expression of subsidence risk.
Mining operations increasingly use AEM for environmental and closure planning. Surveys map tailings pond seepage, characterize groundwater systems affected by pit dewatering, monitor acid mine drainage migration, and support rehabilitation programs by mapping the hydrogeological changes produced by mining activity. The Raptor's full-waveform archive supports long-term monitoring programs where baseline and repeat surveys need to be directly comparable.
For remediation programs that run over years or decades, the ability to reprocess historical survey data as algorithms improve is a real practical benefit. The Raptor captures the complete raw measurement record and archives it in a synchronized pipeline. Baseline surveys flown today will yield more information as processing techniques develop, without requiring additional field work.
Time domain electromagnetics detects variations in the electrical resistivity of subsurface materials. The method measures the decay of secondary electromagnetic fields induced in the earth after the transmitter is switched off, and inverts those decay curves to produce a layered resistivity model. Many environmental targets produce clear, mappable anomalies: conductive leachate plumes and ionic contamination appear as low-resistivity zones, while fresh groundwater, clean sand, and resistive bedrock appear as high-resistivity units. The method is non-invasive, requires no ground contact, and works over terrain that is inaccessible on foot. For large-area characterization, it is consistently faster and more cost-effective than ground-based EM or drilling-led programs.