Pop-up ambient noise data acquisition (PANDA) system

The Pop-up Ambient Noise Data Acquisition (PANDA) system described in this paper is a compact, cost-effective and self-contained submerged data acquis ition system for collecting acoustic data. PANDA can be bottom-mounted, col lecting data without surface expression, making it ideal for collecting dat a in high shipping and/or fishing activity locations. Assembled largely fro m "commercial off-the-shelf" (COTS) components, the design time and unit co st have been minimised without compromising reliability. The electronic des ign is based on a PC motherboard computer system. The system as currently c onfigured has a maximum sampling rate of 330 kHz and a maximum storage capa city of 1.2 GB. These values can be changed simply by exchanging COTS plug- in components. This flexibility of design, permitting the configuration to be changed quickly and cheaply to suit different deployment requirements, i s an important feature of the system. The system can also be configured to record from multiple transducers of all types. PANDA was designed and built in 7 months, and is currently being used to collect long-term samples of a mbient noise for ship noise analysis. Some example data are presented to il lustrate the system's capability.