ABSTRACT
This chapter develops the commonality viewpoint and highlights the capabilities of the basic ranging mechanisms in the ocean environment. The results are of interest when weighting and merging redundant data collected via different ocean channels in order to localize and track the source. The range bias equation is derived for a source located at any range from unequally spaced subarrays. The influence of varied linear array configurations on passive ranging is determined when imperfect measurements of the time delays between the subarrays are available. The exact bias and far-field bias and variance relations on the source range estimates are derived as a function on unequal subarray separation. The results are contrasted with those found in the literature on equally separated subarrays to highlight the sensitivity and resulting degradation in performance. Since the range variance is related to the true range and to the incurred bias, it degrades much more rapidly.
