Loch Duich, a seawater loch on the north west cost of Scotland (57° 13.4'N, 5° 26.2'W)

Acoustic noise in the water column; Acoustic backscatter in the water column

Acoustic tracking systems; acoustic backscatter sensors

The AIDA project aimed to demonstrate the feasibility of underwater acoustic telemetry systems dedicated to image transmission from an underwater vehicle swimming near the sea bed to a surface vessel. The project provided general solutions for the design of a large class of such systems and assessed their performance with real and synthetic underwater acoustic data. The project was primarily concerned with communication ranges of 500-3000m on the coastal or continental shelf (depth <300m) with relative transmitter to receiver speeds of <2m/s. Data rates of up to 25kbaud were considered with bit error rates of the order 10e-3. The test data were transmitted through a number of different underwater channels and the signals received at an array of 0.5-1 lambda spaced transducer elements on up to 8 channels were acquired at a 200KHz sampling rate. In the MS-DOS binary archive files all sample data are represented as signed integers. The data comprise pseudo random sequences, carrier frequency bursts (50KHz), sine waves at 40, 50 and 60KHZ and modulated 2, 4, 8 and 16DPSK and 8 and 16QAM. All data have been examined for critical faults or noise.

University of Newcastle upon Tyne School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering
Merz Court
Newcastle upon Tyne
Tyne and Wear
NE1 7RU
United Kingdom