The Indian Navy on Friday inducted four indigenous sonars to give a boost to its underwater surveillance capability.The systems are Abhay -- a Compact Hull Mounted Sonar for Shallow Water Crafts; Humsa UG, an upgrade of the Humsa Sonar System; NACS or Near-field Acoustic Characterisation System; and AIDSS or Advanced Indigenous Distress Sonar System for submarines. Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar and Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba were present on the occasion.The sonars have been designed and developed by Naval Physical and Oceanographic Laboratory, a Kochi-based premier laboratory of Defence Research and Development Organisation.Abhay is an advanced active-cum-passive integrated sonar system designed and developed for smaller platforms such as shallow watercrafts and coastal surveillance and patrol vessels. The Indian Navy has proposed to deploy this sonar on three of its Abhay-class ships.Using the latest technology in hardware architecture and advanced signal processing algorithms, the sonar is capable of detecting, localising, classifying and tracking sub-surface and surface targets in both active and passive modes of operation.
The prototype of this compact sonar installed onboard a nominated naval platform has successfully completed all user-evaluation trials to demonstrate the features as per the Naval Staff Qualification Requirements.Humsa UG has hardware architecture based on the state-of-the-art open architecture processor technologies to enable smooth upgrade of the system capabilities. This system is proposed to be installed on seven ships of three classes of ships.NACS determines the in-situ performance of the sonar system used to find the frequency-dependent 3-D transmission and reception characteristics of the sonar.It is also used to measure the magnitude and phase characteristics of the sonar transmission and reception electronics and transducers.AIDSS is a distress Sonar or an emergency sound signalling device used to indicate a submarine in distress and enable quick rescue and salvage.It is a life-saving alarm system designed to transmit sonar signals of a pre-designated frequency and pulse shape in an emergency situation from a submarine for long period.A Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the ministries of defence and skill development in July 2015 to enhance the skill sets of retiring defence personnel.In the pilot batch, 70 retiring naval personnel have been trained in collaboration with the National Skill Development Corporation, the Indian Navy said.Parrikar along with Skill Development Minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy handed over skill certificates to retiring naval personnel on the occasion.