Technology
The UPAL system is an autonomous underwater acoustic recorder with an internal battery designed to attach to any mooring or buoy system. The system incorporates both hardware and software components.
From a hardware perspective, the UPAL system consists of a broadband, low-noise hydrophone, a low-power microprocessor with a 100-kHz analog-to-digital (A/D/) digitizer, a memory card for internal storage and a battery pack. These hardware components are integrated into a water proof housing.
The microprocessor has a low-power sleep mode to save energy between acoustic samples which allows autonomous deployment for up to one year.
The UPAL system also incorporates an adaptive sampling strategy to record data samples at smart intervals as well as user-defined intervals.
From a software perspective, the UPAL system contains a detection and classification algorithm used to detect and classify sound sources.
