The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution digital ocean bottom hydrophone instrument : technical report

Abstract

This report describes the design and capabilities of a new ocean bottom hydrophone instrument. The instrument is microprocessor controlled and records digitally on a commercially available cartridge tape recorder with a formatted capacity of 16.7 megabytes. It can operate at sampling intervals between 80 and 8500 Hz and has a dynamic range of 120dB. Both the hardware and software are designed to provide the maximum flexibility in operation allowing either preprogrammed or event detect operation for either short deployment high sampling rate experiments or extended deployment low data rate applications. The microprocessor and recording electronics are capable of handling four data channels and thus the existing recording package is suitable for the ocean bottom seismometer application (or similar} with little or no modification.