Direction determining apparatus

Abstract

A system for ascertaining the bearing of a remotely-located acoustic signal ource including a hydrophone array having an omnidirectional hydrophone and a pair of orthogonally-oriented directional hydrophones all of whose output signals are applied to a processor which combines the output signals of the directional hydrophones to provide a signal shifted in phase relative to the omnidirectional output signal by an amount equal to the bearing angle and which resolves the phase-shifted signal by phase detection into a pair of signals representative of the sine and cosine of the bearing angle. The sine and cosine signals are processed by integrators and a bearing angle computer to provide an output signal indicative of the bearing angle to a display. A second embodiment of the processor combines the directional hydrophone output signals into a pair of phase shifted signals for resolution, one leading and the other lagging the phase of the omnidirectional signal by an amount equal to the bearing angle.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.