At Sygma Solutions, our business revolves entirely around CAT and Genny training.

It wouldn’t be the first time that someone has said that you can’t train a cat. To the extent that you can train it to come as soon as you put the food down, you can. But if you know anything about cats at all, you will know that the rest of the time they do their own thing. They will do precisely what they want to do. In essence, you do not own a cat: it owns you.

However, we are not talking cats here, we are talking CATS. That is, as in Cable Avoidance Tool. CAT for short. And Genny. She is the signal generator. You attach her to a service pipe/cable/whatever, and she generates a signal which can be picked up by the CAT so that you can determine where underground services run.

All of which is essential if you are undertaking any sort of excavating or digging work, whatever the reason may be.

OK, you can probably dig fairly safely in your own garden if you are just planting some potatoes or runner beans, but then you are not going down further than a foot. Even then, you have at least one electricity cable running into your home, water pipes, sewage pipes, and almost certainly a telephone cable, and perhaps gas as well. Do you actually know where they run and how deep they are? Answers on a postcard.

Yes, you may be fairly safe planting those beans, but if you are a contractor charged with constructing the foundations for a home, or perhaps a 30-storey office block, you are going to need some pretty solid foundations and that involves digging down far more than a foot.

And on the way are all those underground services running – well – where? You don’t know, do you?

Sure, you can contact all the local utility companies and ask them for plans – or STATS as they are known – and you most certainly should.

But rely entirely on them you most certainly should not. It cannot be over-emphasised that they are only a guide. Different areas use different formats. They may be completely out of date. They can be wrong when referring to depth or precisely where they lay. There can be all sorts of problems with them. Including situations where contractors employed by the utility concerned have cut corners in order to save time or money or play catch-up. You just never know. So while they can be useful, you cannot possibly rely on them 100%.

This is why you need to use our friends the CAT and Genny. However, this is something else that you cannot entirely rely on either. They are excellent pieces of equipment and can help considerably in locating and identifying underground services just so long as you understand how to use them, and more importantly, the fact that they have certain limitations.

For example, it is quite possible for the CAT and Genny – even when used in conjunction, as they should be – to give a false reading.

You may wonder why this should be.

Here is a simple example: you get a negative reading, so you jump into your JCB and start merrily digging away. Just over a metre down you strike a gas pipe that the CAT and Genny told you wasn’t there!

Confused.com?

It is actually not that difficult when you understand what happened. The tools you were using could only read to a certain depth, so they were correct in telling you that there was nothing there – as far as they could detect!! There was something there, but it was lower than they could show it.

This is why you need the CAT course and Genny training that we provide at Sygma Solutions. Our courses are recognised by The Survey Association, the CSCS, EUSR, and more. They will teach you how to use the CAT and Genny in all their different modes, and most importantly how to avoid making basic mistakes when using them.

When you pass one of our courses you will be accepted for working on sites that have very high requirements when it comes to safety and security, such as HS2 among others. Our courses are the best that there are.