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To all: Sunday morning I will attempt to install a picture of my 18 hydrophone passive array I have been tinkering with for some time onto our club web site under the special project called passive sonar listed under my name. If this thing fails to work, it will become the most perfect mistake that I have ever done. If some of you can recall, an attempt for an initial array consisting of only six hydrophones each having a very wide area of coverage of some sixty degrees wide was performed and tested in 2008. It was mounted over the side of a small John boat. This system worked well for what was put into it. The planned hydrophone to hydrophone comparisons were not able to be performed with this simple system on account of switch bounce found within the hydrophone selector unit. This original hydrophone selector unit (HSU) has since been redesigned to use a set of stator brushes instead of micro switches and with the increase in the number of hydrophones should prove more accurate. Each hydrophone should be covering only around 20 degrees with some overlap. At present, nine of the eighteen hydrophones have been installed and the system will be initially tested with only this 180 degrees of coverage. This should be adequate enough to determine if this system will be worth further investment and research. The testing results of this system are not expected for some time as I still have one additional underwater communications console to complete first. (#6) David Bartsch Hotmail® has ever-growing storage! Don’t worry about storage limits. Check it out. |