E-mail comes to submarines

The "You got Mail" greeting can soon also be heard by thousands of sailors aboard US Navy submarines cruising the ocean at depths of up to 400 feet. Until now, a submarine vessel had to surface or halt in order to raise an antenna to the surface to send and receive e-mail messages. Such actions were extremely risky in terms of giving away the vessel’s location.

Now, Benthos, a Massachusetts company has developed a way to send e-mails using sound energy waves to transmit information through the water to a relayer buoy that can be up to three miles away. Signals were sent at a rate of 2,400 bits per second, slow when compared to 33K and 56K data rates of most home computers, but lightning fast for using underwater sound waves.

The system was recently tested off the California Coast by the USS Dolphin The technology not only has military applications, but can be used by the gas and oil drilling industry, for weather tracking and other underwater research, said Benthos president and chief executive John Coughlin. Benthos developed the technology with a grant from the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command Center in San Diego.