High continuous bandwidth multichannel acquisition system

Multichannel data acquisition has been a keystone of 7 ONR sponsored Arctic acoustic research programs conducted jointly by WHOI and MIT investigators from 1978 through 1989. This report describes the status and capability of the most recent system developed at WHOI for the purpose of acquiring digital data from up to 64 channels at sampling rates up to 20 kH per channel with data bandwidth to 5120 Hz. ONR funded the development of and use of this system and its prototye for 2 Arctic field experiments, PRUDEX 87 and CEAREX 89. It was most recently use during the Heard Island Feasibility Experiment in February 1991. Of note are the auto-gain ranging capabilty offering a dynamic measurement range of greater than 120 dB, the continuous storage capability of up to 200,000 samples per second to a Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) device, typically optical disk, and easy expandability with additional identical chanels connected in parallel.Funding was provided by the Office of Naval Research under Contract No. N00014-91-J-1296