Underwater radio frequency communications

This paper provides a broad overview of electromagnetic technologies in the context of subsea navigation/position fixing and telemetry applications. Acoustics provides a more energy efficient solution for subsea applications than electromagnetic (EM), however the technology is subject to environmental performance limitations by virtue of the acoustic multipath phenomenon. Wideband signal processing has been shown to help mitigate multipath problem, but it has also been shown that it does not necessarily eliminate it, and micropath remains a difficult problem in subsea precision measurement such as metrology.