High-performance, multi-faceted research sonar electronics

This thesis describes the design, implementation and testing of a research sonar system capable of performing complex applications such as coherent Doppler measurement and synthetic aperture imaging. Specifically, this thesis presents an approach to improve the precision of the timing control and increase the signal-to-noise ratio of an existing research sonar. A dedicated timing control subsystem, and hardware drivers are designed to improve the efficiency of the old sonar's timing operations. A low noise preamplifier is designed to reduce the noise component in the received signal arriving at the input of the system's data acquisition board. Noise analysis, frequency response, and timing simulation data are generated in order to predict the functionality and performance improvements expected when the subsystems are implemented. Experimental data, gathered using these subsystems, are presented, and are shown to closely match the simulation results, thus verifying performance.