Making the most of field data to support underwater acoustic communications R&D

Field data is often expensive to collect, time-consuming to prepare to collect, and even more time-consuming to process after the experiment has concluded. However, it is often the practice that such data are used for the research activity that was concomitant with the experiment, and then for little else after the funded research activity is completed. This paper discusses useful steps that can be taken to 1) collect sufficient environmental statistics such that subsequent research can be accomplished long after the experiment has completed, and that results from a given experiment may be reasonably compared with those of another, and 2) prepare signals for transmission and subsequent recording such that research trades for different modulation and coding schemes may be undertaken post-experiment, without the need for retransmission of additional waveforms, and 3) creation of an sufficiently meaningful model and collection of sufficient data to enable post-experimental replay of the environment.