Diver Communications System for Saturated Diving Applications

Communications between divers at depth and other supporting personnel has, in the past, proven to be a difficult problem. In particular saturation diving techniques at extreme hyperbaric pressures tend to severely distort human speech to the point of unintelligibility. Furthermore, the communications system must be tailored to meet the physical and operational needs of the necessary personnel between the various remote support stations. This paper describes a helium saturation or air diving communications system, designed and fabricated for the US Navy, that provides high quality communications between four divers and the various supporting personnel on the support ship, PTC, and decompression chambers.