Colin Clarke – Describing sonar arrays

So, some are down the hull, some are fitted into the fin of a submarine. In the older Class Submarines, on the diesel boats, you would have seen a dome on the front of the bow, there was a Sonar Array in there.

There’s what we call a ‘Chinstrap Array’. So, there’s a Sonar Array that runs round the front of a nuclear submarine. That’s what we call it, a ‘Chinstrap Array’ because it round there.

There’s a Towed Arrays as well, so Towed Sonar Systems, so there’s a number of hydrophones configured to make up different Array types to do different tasks really.

If you’re towing a sonar, a passive sonar, what you’re doing is you’re removing it from all the own ship’s noise in the ship, so you’re actually improving it’s sensitivity and giving it a fighting chance, otherwise it’s got to fight through all own ship’s noise, so that’s one reason for having a towed sonar.

Towed sonars are also very good because you can slow down and allow them to sink and explore a different depth in the Ocean, which you might want to do tactically.

The sonars that are down the side of a submarine, much improved today, but in the early days they were plagued with having lots of own ship’s noise coming in through the back of the hydrophones in effect, so there’s a lot of work on modern sonars that have reduced that issue.