Shallow water multiplexer development for the South Florida Ocean Measurement Center (SFOMC)

This paper briefly presents the development and installation of the South Florida Ocean Engineering Center (SFOMC) shallow water instrumentation. As part of this effort, a new underwater telemetry system (or node) which interconnects a number of at-sea ocean instruments has been deployed in July of 1999, and is currently operating continuously. This node provides to the attached instruments necessary power, monitors the internal operational status, and relays the instruments data back to shore in real time via fiber optic communication. The instruments currently being deployed include an AUV docking station (Florida Atlantic University, FAU), an environmental array (University of South Florida), a passive acoustic ambient noise array (FAU), Cyclesonde (University of Miami), an acoustic modem source and receiver (FAU). As each of these instruments requires a unique data and power requirement, ranging from LonTalk, RS422, to Ethernet/Fast Ethernet connection, there was a great deal of effort spent on the node design with regard to scalability and reconfigurability issues. That is, maximizing the node´s utility in order to support a wide variety of instruments in the future. Besides the modularity constraint, the safety issue has been rigorously addressed in the design given that the node installation site is within diver´s reach. This underwater node will be heavily utilized to support two major scientific experiments (4D current measurement and adverse weather experiments) which are to be carried out in July of 1999. Much of the valuable data sets will are presented