Air-Water Optical Communication Using an Airborne Radio Controlled Aircraft

Communication between land and water has always been a challenge and has intrigued many over time. The chief problem arising from the usage of two different types of waves for each medium - Acoustic for water and electromagnetic for land. If these are swapped they would have major disadvantages rendering them unfeasible. Light being able to travel in both mediums with ease, with very few variations in the two mediums, optical communications becomes the most effective form of air to water communication. In this paper we have explored a setup consisting of a RC glider to demonstrate the working of optical communication. We have made use of an on-off keying modulation to observe the bit error rate on different divergence angles, the angle of deflection of light source and the difference between Tx and Rx.