High Bandwidth, Hull Mounted Array Telemetry and Display System

Driven by the need to operate in acoustically challenging littoral environments, the need for high-channel count, large aperture hull mounted arrays have created a demand for low cost telemetry electronics and operator processing/display aids that aresuitable for large sonar arrays. The proposed telemetry approach leverages the existing TAIPT and Total Ship Monitoring telemetry systems to provide low cost electronics suitable for large sonar arrays. This approach continues to use a two-level telemetryarchitecture that combines a scaleable COTS ATM/SONET network with a simple, high-speed bit serial sensor telemetry. This telemetry approach has demonstrated the ability to synchronize thousands of distributed platform sensors over the same network used totransfer data. This standard network interface simplifies the connection to platform processing resources. The signal and information processing impacts of these voluminous sensors are unavoidable because large number of sensors translates to a largenatural beam set (thousands) to form a large search space. While computer resources have increased, operator resources have remained the same. The processing and display system makes best use of computational power, automation technology, and displayconcepts to achieve desired sensor system performance with available system manning. The high bandwidth, low cost, hull mounted array telemetry developed under this SBIR has direct applications to future submarine sonars including upper, medium and lowfrequency bow conformal arrays, mine hunting and collision avoidance sonars. Since the proposed telemetry is scaleable over frequency and provides a full duplex uplink and downlink it has the ability to transfer complex shipboard generated waveforms totransducers for transmit and receive arrays.This type of telemetry is directly applicable to seismic survey and reservoir monitoring activities for both land and marine applications. Survey crews typically install a grid of velocity sensors (geophones) in large prearranged fields. A typical fieldmay contain as many as 100,000 channels whose signals are multiplexed together and sent to a recording station via an optical or electrical signal path.The processing and display architecture work under this SBIR is directly applicable to future work in submarine combat systems. The Large Hull Array (LHA) sensor, or similar new concepts are certainly candidates for Advanced Processor Builds (APB) in themedium term. It is expected to use the developed architecture, design and integration concepts for the basis of future functional additions. The tasks under this SBIR have wide applicability to new sensor system like the Navy's DD(X) next generationsurface ship, which is expected to include more extensive sonar sensor concepts.