Chester McKinney: A legacy of high frequency sonar development at Applied Research Laboratories, The University of Texas at Austin

Abstract

Following the Korean War, improvements in high frequency, high resolution sonar were needed in order to successfully prosecute naval mines. Chester McKinney led an effort at Applied Research Laboratories (formerly Defense Research Laboratories), The University of Texas at Austin (ARL:UT), to make progress in this important area of research; and began a lifelong passion for Chester to pursue both basic and applied research in high frequency acoustics as applied to mine countermeasures. This research has been performed over many years by numerous scientists and engineers at ARL:UT and continues today. Based on this research, both experimental and operational high frequency, high resolution sonars were constructed, tested, and employed. This paper will explore some of these important sonar developments as well as some of the underlying physics. These developments span from analog implementations of CTFM sonars, pulse sonars, beamformers, and signal processing to early implementations of digital sonars and digital signal processing. Key parts of sonar research will be traced from the AN/UQS-1 to the AN/SQQ-14, AN/SQQ-16, AN/WQS-1, and the Data Collection Test Bed Sonar (development model for the AN/SQQ-32).