The development of an underwater telephone for digital communication purposes

The underwater telephone HTL-10 has been designed to provide voice and data communication between helicopter and submarines using acoustic waves. It works in a halfduplex mode and uses analogue power-efficient modulation in the form of a single side-band, suppressed carrier, in a wide range of frequencies. It generates the transmitted signal, and processes the received signals. It is implemented with the use of digital signal processing techniques. Although it was designed several years ago, the flexible structure of the underwater telephone ensures a convenient platform for the implementation of various types of communication, as well as testing. This ability is due to the particular characteristics of the digital signal-processing module, which was designed by the author, both in hardware and software. The main elements of the module consist of the fixed-point signal processor, and the floating-point high performance digital signal processor. The article demonstrates the ability to adapt HTL-10 to implement digital communication in shallow waters, with a robust low data rate spread spectrum approach.