A shallow water inline multiplexed sensor system used for inwater tracking

The portable tracking system (PTS) will design, activate and validate a portable underwater/in-air instrumented range capability which can be deployed in most water depths and any ocean locations, This capability will be provided through two suites of inwater hardware. The deep PTS system is a transponder based system that provides up to 500 square nautical miles (915 square kilometers) for a test area with depths ranging from 1000 to 20000 feet (approximately 305 to 6096 meters). The shallow PTS system is an inline multiplexed system on a fiber optic cable supporting up to 100 square nautical miles (approximately 183 square kilometers) with depths ranging from 200 to 2000 feet (approximately 61 to 610 meters). The shallow water in-line multiplexed sensor system (SWIMSS) is a prototype PTS shallow water system. It consists of ten in-line hydrophone sensor nodes. Each sensor node is connected via one nautical mile (approximately 1.83 kilometers) of electrical mechanical optical cable(EMOC). The SWIMSS is deployed from the stem of a ship with the use of a linear cable engine. The hydrophone sensors are broadband and are used to telemeter inwater acoustic ping signals back to a signal processor and automatic data processing equipment suite where pings are detected and inwater vehicles are tracked and displayed