Diver Communication System Upgrade

Voice communication with military divers is challenged by their extreme operating environment and limited by inadequate performance from their legacy communications equipment. Bottomside, the divers are subject to extreme pressures, mixed breathing gases, and high ambient noise. Clean pickup and delivery of voice would be challenging under these conditions even with ideal communications equipment. Unfortunately, the equipment itself is contributing to the communications difficulty. The legacy components often have inadequate frequency response, the long copper cable tether is subject to corrupting cross talk, and the open-loop nature of 4-wire communications often results in confounding echo and painful audio feedback. Creare proposes to develop its HYDAC upgrade package for the legacy diving communication system. The HYDAC package is a collection of modular upgrades that address the deficiencies of the legacy system, provide forward-looking advanced capabilities, while also maintaining full backward compatibility.