Tan watched the courier wheel the last box into the lorry. It was a simple thing that had not been simple to make.
It was a sonar sounder, to emit high powered sound waves into the water. That bit was fine, apart from the power level, which was 20 times anything that could be bought, at least, bought without figuring out how to get it past export restrictions.
How'd he done it? He nearly hadn't. They'd destroyed about a dozen transducers when the word came down that the thing would need to run for 10 days, maximum, and that it only had to work between 65 and 85 Hertz. That was a big load off.
And he could cut 0.1 of a decibel off the output for every 3 meters he could get it to tolerate under 50. That was possible.
His guys had tore open the commercial units and got to work on rehousing them. The actual core of it was much more robust than the labels indicated. They'd pulled in the Navy's Sonar expert, and a couple of repair techs from the shipyards, keeping the latter suitably in the dark as to what was going on. They thought they were helping a university project that was funded by businesses.
Eventually they'd got something together that matched the spec asked for. It was pretty clear that the device was to be a modulator for some sort of submarine data channel, once the duty cycles were divulged. Who knew what for? It was an impressive device at any rate, and they'd built 4 so far. The first one had held up to impressive abuse, the rest were cloned off it. As long as his bosses had been honest about the specification, they'd do what they were meant to. It had been an interesting project, although he wondered why they hadn't been able to get military sonars.