Abstract
Underwater acoustic methods have been applied to the problem of simultaneously tracking three towed vehicles in a specialized range facility at the U. S. Navy Mine Defense Laboratory. A self-contained transponder in a streamlined body is attached to each vehicle and the transponder position determined with respect to two bottom-mounted transducer arrays spaced 2000 ft apart. The transponder operates without false triggering in the presence of nearby interfering sonic pulses with levels as high as +75 db ref 1 d/cm2. Freedom from pulse type interference is achieved by a novel transponder design that avoids the use of cascaded tuned amplifiers. Tangentially polarized barium titanate cylinders are used for each of the transmitting and receiving transducers. The range covers an area of 1 square mile and the instantaneous position of the transponders is determined once every 2 sec to a precision of ±5 ft within the optimum triangulation area. The resolution of the tracking range is sufficiently high to correctly identify the position of each of two transponders separated by 10 ft with a standard deviation of 3 ft.
Published Version
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