Underwater electro-optic intercom system design

Abstract

The underwater optical communication is getting more popular day by day. About 71 % of the Earth’s surface is covered with water and 96,5 % of this covered area is the oceans. During the past thousand years, human have never stopped exploring the oceans. Most of the comprehensive ocean explorations made underwater world and it became a great interest to the scientific, industrial and military societies. Underwater communication makes the underwater explorations possible. Bidirectional and secure underwater communication is a very challenging task even with nowadays technology, because the methods for wireless communication in air, do not work in water. In this thesis, Radio Frequency, acoustic and optical communication methods for underwater environment are inspected by comparing advantages and disadvantages of the methods. In addition to this, one transmitter and one receiver of underwater optical communication electronic system and one laryngophone system prototype is designed and constructed. The directional optical communication between one transmitter and one receiver has been successfully demonstrated on the field and error free audio communication has been successfully accomplished at a distance of 60 meters