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Can you measure distance (cca. with precision 0.1m-1m) with sound through soil. I know this is really crazy think to do, but I have this idea quite for a while. Basically I will set speakers on fix distance and measure how much time does sound takes to come to microphone. I will repeat test to get some average speed in soil at that day. So If I will place speaker on random distance, could I calculate distance to microphone(knowing avg. speed through soil)? Is soil reliable enough to do this, with some precision and reliability? What kind of powerful speaker do you need for 100m, 200m, 300m distance, on what frequency this operate best?

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  • $\begingroup$ There is this article, Oelze et al Measurement of Attenuation and Speed of Sound in Soils (2002) that measures the speed of sound in various soils samples. So it seems like yes, but reliability & consistency I'm not sure about. $\endgroup$
    – Kyle Kanos
    Commented Jul 9, 2015 at 19:13
  • $\begingroup$ It should be possible, but with a lot of caveats. I am pretty sure the soil doesn't have a resonant frequency, so your best bet for the signal will probably be to just measure the local signal and find an empty pocket in the spectrum. Power required will generally vary with distance squared. I highly doubt soil is generally reliable enough to code some constant in, but perhaps with calibration procedure, your measurements could be accurate enough in some locale. $\endgroup$
    – Alan
    Commented Jul 9, 2015 at 19:21

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