Abstract
There are many underwater acoustic communication and navigation applications that employ multiple sensors, both as transmitters and receivers. For example, multi-element arrays are used to electronically steer an acoustic signal in an intended direction (transmit mode), as well as others to determine the bearing angle of a signal source (receive mode). The intent of this thesis is to develop a transmit/receive (transceiver) control board that will interface with a PC (or other device through serial communication) to a multi-channel power amplifier (transmit mode) and a multi-channel preamplifier (receive mode). The transceiver control board is based on a low-power digital signal processor (DSP) that will accept a serial command from a host PC and either generate the appropriate signal(s) to the Class D power amplifier(s) or return the sampled receive data from any of the receive channels. The control board consists of a DSP, multi-channel digital to analog converter (DAC), and multi-channel analog to digital converter (ADC), and associated voltage supplies to operate from a single 12 VDC source.