Locate andor marking operations involve detecting andor marking a presence or an absence of at least one underground facility within a dig area, wherein at least a portion of the dig area is planned to be excavated or disturbed during excavation activities. The multiplicand is encoded into an independent binary system instead of a conventional binary system and each bit value of the encoded multiplicand is used as a control signal about an inputted multiplier in order to effectively execute a fixed point multiplication used in a transform algorithm such as the DCT in use for a multimedia codec. The tube also has a set of slots adjacent to the apertures, with protrusions between each aperture and its adjacent slot.