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A new strategy for sending acoustic waves through water could potentially open up the world of high-speed communications activities underwater, including scuba diving, remote ocean monitoring, and deep-sea exploration.
By taking advantage of the dynamic rotation generated as acoustic waves travel, the orbital angular momenta, researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) were able to pack more channels onto a single frequency, effectively increasing the amount of information capable of being transmitted.
They demonstrated this by encoding in binary form the letters that make up the word "Berkeley," and transmitting the information along an acoustic signal that would normally carry less data. They describe their findings in a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[...] While human activity below the surface of the sea increases, the ability to communicate underwater has not kept pace, limited in large part by physics. Microwaves are quickly absorbed in water, so transmissions cannot get far. Optical communication is no better since light gets scattered by underwater microparticles when traveling over long distances.
Low frequency acoustics is the option that remains for long-range underwater communication. Applications for sonar abound, including navigation, seafloor mapping, fishing, offshore oil surveying, and vessel detection.
However, the tradeoff with acoustic communication, particularly with distances of 200 meters or more, is that the available bandwidth is limited to a frequency range within 20 kilohertz. Frequency that low limits the rate of data transmission to tens of kilobits per second, a speed that harkens back to the days of dialup internet connections and 56-kilobit-per-second modems, the researchers said.
Transmitting data acoustically could tip off the dolphins and whales to our plans...
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday June 28 2017, @11:23AM (1 child)
Better at deep sea then in the middle of nowhere on the land, at least you'll be able to tweet.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday June 28 2017, @05:56PM
If you start tweeting while we're diving, I will have to tell the coast guard that the Great White who took you went swimming that way sir, yes sir, that way for sure, not where the corals that were bleached yesterday have recovered a nice crimson color and someone disturbed the rocks and the sand, no sir, that mean mean Great White totally went the other way, and if someone finds the shark can they return the knife I valiantly but fruitlessly used to try to save you, I really liked that knife, nice and sharp, could cut through hoses and flesh like warm butter, sir, a good knife, that the mean mean shark took away when it surprised the silly tweeting man, that way, not where the other predators and bottom feeders are now gathering, sir, that other way down there...