DSP Diver Communication System

The Imenco Nautronix DSP Dive Communications Helium Speech Unscrambler is fully digital in design and utilises the latest and most modern processing systems to provide the highest speech intelligibility.

The physical properties of a high pressure heliox (helium-oxygen) atmosphere produce significant changes in the speech generation mechanism for a resident diver which at deeper depths results in largely unintelligible speech.

Imenco Nautronix have developed a full frequency domain algorithm, which completely models the effects of the high-pressure helium environment on the vocal tract.  The algorithm is computationally intensive, sampling speech at 44 kHz, and makes use of the very latest DSP (Digital Signal Processing) devices.  These devices are capable of executing over 100 million floating-point arithmetic operations per second and are fully utilised in the new algorithm.

Evaluation of unscrambled speech from these algorithms has shown intelligibility levels close to 100% at standard helium diving depths and better than 91% at 450m.

Individual modules are available for wet diver, dry diver, tender control, power, entertainment, record and unscrambler.  Full control of the system is provided via the tender module where communication ‘groups’ are set up.  A group can consist of any number of modules and one unscrambler.  A unique group cross talk feature is available to allow divers at different depths to communicate clearly.

Other unique features include a design with no electronics at the diver end, innovative noise and electrical pick-up cancelling circuitry and built in breathing noise reduction and full integration to Nautronix Emergency Through Water Communication System.