Miniaturized Sonobuoy High-Data-Rate Tether

SLA plans to address the Navy’s need for a strengthened, full-duplex communications datalink between the surface unit of a sonobuoy and its suspended payload, as described in Navy SBIR Topic N221-023.  SLA and AFFOA will partner to understand the problem posed in the Topic, to develop a notional approach to design a fiber which will act both as a strength member to support the suspended payload and as a communication pathway between the payload and the upper unit of the sonobuoy, and to develop innovations with respect to existing challenges in buoy operational life / mean time between failure, unit production cost, and tensile strength, including exploring new inner diameter pack form factors, which will incorporate smaller subsystems thus pushing the fiber wrap outward and enlarging the fiber innermost wrap diameter, exploring potential lower-cost raw materials and potential dual-use materials to minimize the BOM and processing steps, and exploring dual-battery pack technologies and wake up methodologies.