Design and Construction of a Sonar Workstation

During 1985 we designed and constructed an acoustic workstation as a research tool for the development of acoustic current profiling instruments. This project was initiated by order of the Netherlands Rijkswaterstaat and special attention was to be given to the application of current measurement in shallow water. As a research workstation, the system supports a wide range of data acquisition schemes, suited for broadband scattering measurements, Doppler current profiling and high resolution echosounding. Several custom-designed hardware modules had to be developed to yield a flexible instrument for underwater inspection. In this paper the hardware concepts of this so-called ´Sonar Workstation´ will be discussed and several areas of application will be indicated.