A LARGE DYNAMIC RANGE VERTICAL ARRAY OF ACOUSTIC SENSORS

A large dynamic range vertical line array of acoustic sensors has been designed and four of these arrays have been fabricated and deployed at sea. Each of the four arrays consists of 64 hydrophone elements with 1.875 m interelement spacing (λ/2 at 400 Hz). The time series from the array elements is sampled at fs = 1.5 kHz using 24 bit A/D converters and multiplexed onto a single digital data stream for transmission to the data recording hardware. In addition, there are 16 navigation receivers embedded in each array for localizing the array elements. These navigation receivers detect transponder arrivals in the 7.5–14.5 kHz band.