Survey on the development of a Low Cost Underwater Acoustic Modem
News Flash: Low cost acoustic modems available now!
Underwater acoustic modems have been traditionally targeted at the sub-sea oil and gas as well as the defense industry. To meet the demanding criteria of reliability, performance and extended support that these industries require these product attract a price premium. This precludes the utilization of these products in numerous applications that can benefit from these devices.
Some of these areas are Aquaculture, underwater monitoring and networking such as internet of things underwater (IOTU). We get many inquiries from educational institutes and SMEs, however we find that pricing in it’s current form is a barrier for these entities to utilize these products. Therefore DSPComm wishes to embark on the development of a low cost underwater acoustic modem.
This is true across the spectrum of underwater modem manufacturers. There are lower cost products available from certain vendors but the performance of these modems are quite poor thus defeating the objectives of the developer of an innovative underwater product.
We believe that we may have the answer to this problem by developing a quality modem with adequate performance for a majority of these applications. Presently there are many advances and options in micro controller technology that can be leveraged to provide a performance modem yet at a low enough price point. In particular we have gained a lot of experience with the latest generation ARM Cortex processors that are powerful and power efficient. Though these processors are not Digital Signal Processors (DSP) they do have DSP capable cores incorporated within which make them viable for the mathematically intensive calculations that are demanded by underwater modems.
We wish to conduct a survey from would be underwater product developer to guage their interest in such a modem. Our target would be to develop a low cost acoustic modem at price point less than US$1,000. This would include an OEM board and a low cost molded transducer capable of a communication distance of 1km.
The low cost underwater acoustic modems will enable the wider applications in the AUV arena and cost effective wireless networking for Internet of Things Underwater.
We would be very interested to hear your thoughts on the low cost underwater acoustic modems so please leave a comment or contact us directly. If the response is positive and the idea is popular we will answer your needs.