Southern Rural Water groundwater and rivers manager Craig Parker recently confirmed a gauging station earmarked for near the Swing Bridge had never been installed.

SRW had been ''calculating'' river flow readings from the phantom station since 2000 by using readings from monitoring stations at Kilmany South and Bundalaguah, minus entitlements for irrigation and industry.

SRW Groundwater and Rivers manager Craig Parker claimed because the Swing Bridge site was a tidal site, monitoring equipment could not distinguish tidal flows from river flows, which would make any data useless for river monitoring.

But it has since been revealed the technology does exist to monitor a tidal site like that near the Swing Bridge.

A Department of Sustainability and Environment spokesperson recently confirmed DSE was testing the feasibility of Acoustic Doppler Velocity Meters (ADVMs) for use at stream flow gauging stations where conventional methods can not be used.

An ADVM is a sonar instrument that attempts to produce a record of water current velocities for a range of depths, and can be used to measure river and stream flows.

ADVMs measure velocity, rather than water levels as used by traditional monitoring stations, and allow measurements to be collected in difficult conditions, including floods, extreme low flows and tidal variations.

The spokesperson said ADVMs are currently being trialled by DSE at three sites on the Latrobe, Goulburn and Murray Rivers.

''The Swing Bridge may be a suitable site for using this new technology,'' the spokesperson said.

Thiess Services national operations manager for hydrographic services Michael Bridges said ADVM technology was being used in southern NSW and Victoria, and there is widespread use in the USA and Europe.

''In terms of the technology, it's certainly there now,'' he said.