Digital Signal Processing in Triple Antenna ARVAs

Time is essential in the rescue of people buried by snow avalanches. An ARVA (French acronym for Appareil de Recherche de Victimes d´Avalanches) is a safety device, which transmits a magnetic field that can be detected by the rescuer´s ARVA. Triple antenna ARVAs with DSP (Digital Signal Processor) core have been recently developed to make the search easier and faster, but there are few published studies of the digital signal processing that would give precise results. This paper suggests the different tasks the DSP should perform, i.e. signal filtering, detection and estimation, and proposes several DSP techniques that would give an accurate estimation of the received magnetic field vector.