Abstract

The Pop-up Ambient Noise Data Acquisition (PANDA) system described in this paper is a compact, cost-effective and self-contained submerged data acquisition system for collecting acoustic data. PANDA can be bottom-mounted, collecting data without surface expression, making it ideal for collecting data in high shipping and/or fishing activity locations. Assembled largely from "commercial off-the-shelf" (COTS) components, the design time and unit cost have been minimised without compromising reliability. The electronic design is based on a PC motherboard computer system. The system as currently configured has a maximum sampling rate of 330 kHz and a maximum storage capacity of 1.2 GB. These values can be changed simply by exchanging COTS plug-in components. This flexibility of design, permitting the configuration to be changed quickly and cheaply to suit different deployment requirements, is an important feature of the system. The system can also be configured to record from multiple transducers of all types. PANDA was designed and built in 7 months, and is currently being used to collect long-term samples of ambient noise for ship noise analysis. Some example data are presented to illustrate the system's capability.