• 한국수산과학회지
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• 제54권5호
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• pp.798-807
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• 2021

The directivity characteristics of acoustic transducers for conventional single-beam echo sounders considerably limit the detection of fish-size information in acoustic field surveys. To overcome this limitation, using the split-aperture technique to estimate the direction of arrival of single-echo signals from individual fish distributed within the sound beam represents the most reliable method for fish-size classification. For this purpose, we design and develop a split-beam data acquisition and processing system to obtain fish-size information in conjunction with a 50-kHz single-beam echo sounder. This split-beam data acquisition and processing system consists of a notebook PC, a field-programmable gate array board, an external single-transmitter module with a matching network, and four-channel receiver modules operating at a frequency of 50-kHz. The functionality of the developed split-beam data processor is tested and evaluated. Acoustic measurements in an experimental water tank showed that the developed data acquisition and processing system can be used as a fish-sizing echo sounder to estimate the size distribution of individual fish, although an external single-transmitter module with a matching network is required.