Bathymetry is used to determine optimal tactics during Mine Warfare operations. Previous work demonstrated that bathymetric data could be acquired from the Volume Search Sonar (VSS) mounted on the AQS-20 system. The VSS transmitter produces a pulse at approximately one-second intervals along the track. The returning pulse from the sea-bottom is received by a group of sensors and beamformed in hardware into two fans (one pitched slightly forward and a second pitched slightly aft). A possible way to increase the accuracy of the bathymetry data is to improve the angle of arrival estimates by processing the adjacent across-track and/or along-track beam pairs. This paper employs narrow-beams monopulse techniques in order to investigate improvements to the bathymetric data over conventional processing. A comparative analysis of the experimental results for both the new and the classical technique is presented.
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