One signal path, 13 stages
Sample the water, solve for a pulse, synthesise it, put it in the water, catch what comes back, and compare the result to what was predicted. Everything else on this site is a detail of one of these stages.
The chain
The deadline
All 13 stages run inside one ping interval. That is what makes the adaptation real rather than a setting: by the time the operator could have changed anything, the payload has already sampled, solved, transmitted and correlated, and the next decision is using the gap between predicted and measured SNR as an input.
The three legs are not equal in confidence. The transmit chain is measured on the bench. The water leg is modelled — nothing has been in the sea. The receive chain is built and running but characterised in air, which is why its stages read Implemented rather than Measured.