Royal Navy trials 'paging system' for submarines

Hmm ..

If a plane has to fly out to drop the thing, why not just drop a few bombs in a pre-arranged pattern that means 'phone home? The subs will hear it.

This has the advantage of already being certified for use in the air and does not need a satellite.

If we paint the bombs red, white and blue and call them 'tactical submarine communication reacquisition transponders' we could even sell them to the yanks.

Mental image of acoustic message

So there you are, toddling along in the silence of the deep, when suddenly the entire boat starts vibrating to the sounds of a V92 carrier.... Weeeeee ooooooooooh weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee oooooh bong bong weeeeeeeee chchchchchchchch...

"incoming message captain...."

Easier to detect?

Wouldn't having a large buoy in the water kind of give away the fact there is a nuclear submarine somewhere within 100m radius of that buoy? Especially of the buoy is transmitting? How long before some bright spark thinks "hey, we could use the signal to detect exactly where the submarine is, based on the fact the signal gets picked up?". It could possibly remove any element of stealth that sub's have if they used such a system.

Showing my age

I came in assuming a paging system for subs would allow you to swap out the bits you weren't currently using.....

more stranded whales?

not quiet in the deep see any longer.

@David Webb

I dont see how it would be used to determin where ther signal was picked up, its not like its traveling in a straight line and stopping when recieved, the signal will continue to radiate in all directions evan after the sub gets it, Think of it like me standing in a field blind folded shouting I have no way of knowing if anyone heard me... Unless I was a Bat, but then that would be sonar, and they already use that.

PLUS it says in the article that they are not that worried about stealth anymore (It is impled that other countries dont have the capability of stalking and atacking subs... at least not the ones that we are currently at war with)

OKily

So a 100 mile radius is a rather large area, granted, its at least whatever the answer to pi*r^2 is(31 415.9265?). But if a signal is being sent, it has to be collected right? So the sub is there, underwater minding its own business, whilst another submarine is scanning for any tell tail signs than an object is picking up radio signals, or whatever the signals may be.

When my mobile recieves a signal, my speakers do that weird blerping noise, so wouldn't there be technology in place that could detect the blerping noise (which obviously wouldn't be blerping noise) that would be made by any communications device recieving a signal?

I think the idea of it is for stealth only, otherwise the sub could submerge and pick up the signal, in peace time it doesn't really have much of a use I guess, I mean peace times sub's just crawl around looking for giant squids who want to take over the planet, but in war time sub's won't want to surface so a system like this would probably be used then, and in those cases it would give a fair indication to the enemy that a sub is in the general area of that bouy.

I dunno though, to me it does seem like it would be tracable and usable to pinpoint the location of our nuclear deterrent. I'd be happily proven wrong, in that its not possible to scan for electronic equipment picking up a signal and triangulate where that signal is.

@ AC won't work

Presumably using the deep sound channel, otherwise convergence zones would render it useless for most of the 100nm.

But then, it'll also make the job of searching for the boat a lot easier - wait to hear the signal from the buoy and at least you then know the depth to search at.

Siren? Nooooooo..

Sirens are the creatures that lure mariners to their doom on rocks. They do this by singing seductively in a way that can be heard over a long distance so that lonely sailors steer towards them, etc, etc.

Will the Deep Siren have a similar effect on submarines I wonder?

@ David Webb

"When my mobile recieves a signal, my speakers do that weird blerping noise, so wouldn't there be technology in place that could detect the blerping noise"

and when you hear a noise, do your ears make the speakers go blerp as well??

idiot

@ Martin Lyne

Martin Lyne Posted Tuesday 2nd June 2009 12:39 GMT

"assume a sub is in the area and start active sonar pinging

Would this work below the thermal layer?"

Active ping won't work if there are enough thermals to hide in.

"Is it beyond current tech to make an extendable, floating, low-radar-profile, lots-of-slack antenna array that allows the sub to remain fairly submerged but still in comms?"

The cable would make loads of noise dragging in the water as would the winch as it bought the cable in and out. That's way towed arrays are fixed to the sub unlike a surface ship that can drag them back in.

simple solution

If you're really concerned about someone being able to tell that there's a sub within 100 nm of the buoy, the solution's simple: drop several buoys, only one of which broadcasts a real message, the other ones just send 'This is a test' or something innocuous. Or drop several buoys all of which send the same message; that way not even the air crew doing the dropping know which location was the real one. Or, better yet, drop multiple buoys... and drop some of them where _attack_ submarines hang out, and give the attack boys pre-arranged orders to go hunting for anyone who might be disposed to go looking for the recipients of the message. If you drop 10 buoys, and one is near a missile sub, and one is near three or four attack subs, and the rest are dropped in empty water, then 80% of the time the opposition is busy searching for something that's not there, and 10% more he's walking into a trap. If you tell the missile sub crew to get clear as soon as they pick up the message, then even the remaining 10% is likely to be a dry hole by the time that the bad guys get around to it. If they ever do.

why Thailand?

latitude: 13° 45' 0 N, Longitude: 100° 31' 0 E is somewhere in Thailand. What do you have against Thais?

@Sweep

No, when I hear a noise my brain works out the position the noise came from. The noise a speaker picks up is actually the power burst from the TDMA signal which the speakers can detect as a solid state detector. The reference to the mobile phone was very valid, as a pair of speakers can detect a signal being sent to a mobile phone, then I'm sure the military could easily develop equipment which could pick the signal from a submarine as the submarine picks up the signal.

Your post offered nothing to the debate on the issue, if you can provide solid proof that it is not possible to detect when a piece of electronic equipment is recieving a signal then I'm happy to listen. The simple fact is, with a buoy in place a navy/airforce will know there is a submarine within 100 miles of the buoy so will be able to scan the area for signs that a signal is being picked up, it doesn't take a huge leap in logic to assume that any signal being recieved will be detectable.

@David Webb

Another thing that has been missed, even if such tech was available (and its not, and I doubt ever will be) as I said in my previous post, the article cleary states that they are not too concerned about stealth as no one that we are at war with has a navy with the capacity to be a threat to our subs...

Plus I think that some common sense may be applied by the navy in that if we go to war with a country with a comparable naval provision then maybe, just maybe, they wouldnt start dropping these when the sub was in a position where it could be compromised... IE sitting a few miles of the coast of a country we were at war with... might not drop them there... might give the game away..

Raytheon

Never trust a company that pronounces BUOY as 'Boo-ee' instead of 'Boy'.

(They are probably heterosexual or have some type of perversion).

@ Yorkshirepudding

Err... shouldn't that be "pleashh"?