Underwater wireless communication is difficult to design, test, and deploy. The ocean is an unforgiving test environment, with dynamic and often unpredictable propagation characteristics. Access to vessels, dive teams, and favorable weather windows often restrict testing frequency, making rapid iteration nearly impossible.

Unet audio is a great educational tool for using and testing Unet implementations using UnetStack. Unet audio uses your computer’s sound card as an acoustic modem. Almost the entire functionality of UnetStack is available in Unet audio, so you can easily develop and test Unet Agents, try out communications algorithms, and even test your scripts and programs written to interact with UnetStack without needing any extra hardware.

Deploying and configuring an acoustic modem during a field deployment to achieve the best performance can be a challenging task, especially for those who are new to the process. However, with the right tools and techniques provided with UnetStack, it can be accomplished smoothly and efficiently. In this blog, we will provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to deploy and verify a pair of acoustic modems running UnetStack in the field to ensure that it is working correctly and reliably during field deployment. Whether you are setting up a new pair of acoustic modems or troubleshooting an existing one, this guide will provide you with the essential steps to ensure that your wireless system is up and running correctly.

Introduction In the article titled Converting your laptop into a JANUS modem using Unet audio, we saw how UnetStack, a Software-Defined Open Architecture Modem (SDOAM), can be used to turn your laptop into an acoustic modem. A true SDOAM can easily be extended to run on various hardware platforms with different types of physical layers (e.g. Acoustic, optical, RF) with minimal efforts to address different use cases. In this article, we will show how you can build a low-cost (< USD 300) , DIY underwater acoustic modem using only Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components and Unet audio. The goal of this article is to demonstrate the approach and basic steps one can use to build a low cost acoustic modem using Unet audio. We encourage the reader to build on these principles to build your own versions of the DIY modem.

All UnetStack enabled modems have a Real-time Clock (RTC) to keep track of modem’s system time. A separate microsecond counter is provided by phy.time for Physical agent in UnetStack.