Abstract To meet the requirement of a higher speed rate for hydroacoustic communication, an innovative scheme is proposed to simulate an airgun sound source by superimposing two different frequency Ricker Wavelets to form a multi-wave Ricker Wavelet. On the receiver side, two bandpass filters are employed to recover the original information. First, the characteristics of a single Ricker Wavelet, a multi-wave Ricker Wavelet, and an airgun sound source were compared. We found that the multi-wave Ricker Wavelet has characteristics that are similar to the airgun sound source, which leads to the conclusion that using a multi-wave Ricker Wavelet is the best way to simulate the airgun sound source. Secondly, we proposed a method to simulate the airgun sound source for transmission by superposition of two multi-wave Ricker Wavelets of different frequencies, which was an innovative scheme capable of sending two bits of information in one code element duration, thus better meeting the demand for higher communication rates in hydroacoustic communication. Finally, we conducted simulation experiments to verify the validity of the above conclusions. The analysis and elaboration can provide a novel and efficient solution for the field of hydroacoustic communication.