Canadian Ocean Acoustic Measurement
System (COAMS) hydrophone array.
The purpose of this project was to design, build and test a hardware and
software package that could simulate the operation of the 128-element, 2080m
long hydrophone array. The client, the Canadian Department of National
Defense, wanted to be able to verify the operation of new signal processing hardware and software
for COAMS with known test inputs.
Key Project Requirements
The simulator had to produce an output exactly the same as the real COAMS
array.
The user could specify the frequency, signal to noise ratio and location
of up to four distant sources. Any combination of hydrophones could be
designated as non-functional.
The Solution
A combination of a desktop computer (PC) and a digital signal processing (DSP)
board provided the required information flow, and purpose-built digital
hardware put the information in the same format as the COAMS data stream.
The PC provided the user interface, which was programmed in a high level
language, and the DSP board, programmed in assembler language,
provided the computational horsepower necessary to simulate the 128 element
array at a sampling rate of 700 Hz.
