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The Fun Projects

Hydrophone Dolphin Detector

To listen to underwater noises you need an underwater microphone; a hydrophone. You can buy these for anything from $300 upwards, or you can make one using the ceramics that Maplin sell for a few quid. The secret of a successful system, however, is to amplify signals but not the electrical noise that is always present in electrical systems. In order to do this we put a Maplin preamplifier close to the hydrophone (I think Maplins should pay me for all this publicity) then make the entire assembly waterproof. The hydrophone design we use follows closely the work done at Loughborough University by Bender in 1995 (follow the Products link), with a little bit of added simplicity. At the other end we can add a pair of headphones and/or an amplified speaker system. We can also feed the signal into the sound card on our computer and capture the input. Have a look at this brilliant site for examples of the sounds you might encounter when you dip your hydrophone into the water, and for the details of how to make your Dolphin Detector just click: hop to it

Watch this space...

We're commited to it - fun that is - so most of the future projects are going to find their way onto this page. At the moment we're thinking more of the mechanical - a sail for the rubber dinghy and a solar still - but there's also a dog disuader along the lines of a DAZER.