On the performance of conventional and unconventional towed arrays

Abstract

Insights, simplified formulas, and figures are provided to aid in the design of passive hydrophone array systems. The conventional passive towed array (CTA), the fixed-position array (FPA), and the spatially-referenced towed array (SPARTA) are all considered. The CTA is of considerable interest because of its use for synthetic aperture processing. The SPARTA, an alternative array design that has previously been shown to improve upon CTA performance, consists of two subarrays which have different velocities. The investigation is made through the generation of several simplified Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) expressions and through a geometric approach based on concentration ellipses that reveals important features about the joint estimation of bearing and frequency.