Chirp sounding the shallow water acoustic channel

The characterisation of the shallow water acoustic communications channel involves the analysis of sounding data. Chirp signals have many properties which make them an attractive choice for channel sounding. They are easily generated and channel responses can be processed in the time or frequency domain for channel estimation. In the rapidly varying shallow water environment time domain techniques are most appropriate. In this case weighting windows can be used to reduce clutter in the estimate. A channel sounding experiment is described which employs very simple hardware to generate and record chirp responses for offline processing.