A Telemetered Seismic Net in Tasmania

Abstract

WORK during the past eighteen months towards the establishment of a telemetered seismic net in Tasmania has involved research in which electronics and seismology have been brought into close contact. Information about the net itself will be published in detail elsewhere, but the purpose of this communication is to describe new ideas which have arisen from contact between the two fields. The developments have followed two lines. First, the application of electronic amplifiers and the principles of feedback servomechanisms to the design and construction of seismographs. Secondly, and perhaps more important, has been the consideration of problems in observational seismology from the point of view of information theory as the problem of extracting a message from a noisy background. This, by analogy with other fields, has led to the consideration of methods whereby the discrimination of seismographs against background noise could be improved.