Explosive Echo Ranging

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by goldorak

Was there a technical limitation of some sort on the sonobuoys that made the use of small explosive devices necessary ?

They used explosive charges because it was hard to make a small array with a loud enough ping to detect certain types of targets.

Also if small explosive charges were used, am I correct in assuming that they would not have damaged in any way a submarine ?

I doubt it, unless the submarine was very unlucky and was right next to one when it went off.

Last but not least, active pings at least in dw can reach out to 10 nm, what was the typical range of those small explosive devices ? 5 nm ? 10 nm or much much less ?

It's more complicated than that. Since the source and receiver in EER are not co-located, (hence it's called "bistatic") the answer is "it depends" even more so than in other sonobuoys. Detection depends on the distance from both the source and receiver as well as acoustic conditions along both acoustic paths. It's much more complicated to predict their performance than it is with ordinary sonobuoys.