A novel underwater weather station

A new form of underwater weather station has been designed for long term recording with great reliability and low power consumption.The novelty of the instrument lies in its use of a non-destructive,non-volatile magnetic memory. The original instrument was designed as a tide gauge capable of recording deep-sea tides on the ocean floor for at least a year´s duration. Analog data from sensors is multiplexed to an A-D converter with no real limit to the number of sensors that could be so attached. The control program for the operation and cycling of the device is resident in a separate, non-volatile semiconductor memory.This control memory can be re-programmed on a specially designed programmer. Great flexibility of function can be achieved by using this programmable feature. A crystal controlled clock gives the time basis for operation and can be set on the front panel as days, hours, minutes and seconds and can be stored in the plated wire memory as a data record. A built-in teletype converter and D-A converter are included in the underwater device to facilitate communication.