Furuno Electric Company Limited

Ken'ich Watanabe

Yasushi Nishimori

The invention provides an ultrasonic transmit-receive apparatus which solves a false image problem caused by grating lobes and side lobes and offers high bearing resolution without increasing in the scale of hardware or in manufacturing cost. Using a transducer having multiple transducer elements arranged on a surface of the transducer along its circumferential direction, the apparatus emits ultrasonic waves in directionally varying frequency bands and receives echo signals from specified angular directions while selecting the frequency from one direction to another. In a Doppler transmission method, for example, the apparatus drives the individual transducer elements in such a manner that the ultrasonic waves emitted by the transducer elements are equivalent to ultrasonic waves emitted from an imaginary moving sound source moving within a circle enclosed by the multiple transducer elements arranged along the circumferential direction, so that the transducer elements emit ultrasonic signals at directionally varying Doppler shift frequencies.

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Nishinomiya, Japan

Ken'ich Watanabe