A general purpose autonomous transmitter and receiver system for underwater acoustic experiments

A versatile multifrequency, multi-purpose acoustic transmitter and receiver system has been developed and used to measure low frequency acoustic backscatter from the ocean surface. The instrumentation is general purpose in that all signal and sample parameters are selected by software and a variety of transmission, scattering and reverberation experiments are possible without hardware modification. The system is battery-powered and self-contained for remote and unattended operation for periods of months, depending upon the experimental parameters that affect power and tape consumption. The main features of the system are: a high-powered broadband set of acoustic sources-with center frequencies of 100, 200, 400, and 800 Hz, programmable output signal types, a 64-element vertical hydrophone array, fifty gigabytes of data storage capacity, dynamically-tuneable band pass filters and variable sampling rates, high power microprocessors for in situ signal processing and independent subsystems for recording mooring depth and inclination. The system has been used in surface backscattering experiments at sea and results that demonstrate the capability of the system are presented and discussed.