Estimation of efficiency of vertical antenna arrays in underwater sound channels

Abstract

The gain of the vertical antenna array in a randomly inhomogeneous ocean waveguide is numerically simulated on the assumption that the useful signal is generated by a finite set of mutually uncorrelated discrete spectrum modes and is received against the ocean noise background. It is shown that the choice of themost effective weight distribution of the array and the thus obtained gain strongly depend on both the modal spectra of the signal and noise and the number and position of the receiving elements in the channel. The critical factor is the mutual orthogonality of the waveguide modes at the array input, which indicates the possibility of specially arranging the elements for the known (expected) mode spectrum of the signal.