In spring 1999, a sea trial in the coastal region of the Dutch North Sea has been conducted in the scope of the EU-MAST III project ROBLINKS to obtain underwater acoustic data for digital communication in shallow water environments. In this paper, we propose a blind receiver architecture and present results of its application to some specific communication signals transmitted during the experiment. The receiver structure used in the analysis is based on a self-trained adaptive equaliser,

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... d to jointly process the signals from the vertical receiver hydrophone array and to perform the tasks of timing and carrier recovery. The experimental results demonstrate that self-recovering equalisation for coherent communication in shallow water is possible over a range of several kilometres with data rates exceeding 3kbit/s.