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I'm no Sonarman, but I believe they were typical on US Fast Attacks in the 70's & 80's. The Boomer I served on didn't have it. Took me a while to figure out what it was myself lol.
Allies as we are borrow a lot from each other, so it seems possible. Again hard to see what you had. Could also be a WLR-9 Acoustic Intercept Dome. TORPEDO IN THE WATER!!!!!!
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As a former sonarman, I can explain: Nearly all 70's/80's US boomers and fast attacks sported the WLR-9 series of Acoustic Intercept receiver. The system was later modified into the WLR-12 and 17. They looked identical but had internal upgrades. Externally, the systems had two high and low frequency hydrophones. The high frequency phones were mounted on the sail and keel, and the larger, low frequency domes were mounted on the bow and forward keel. Tridents incorporated the system as an integrated sub-system within the BQQ-6. The system had two control indicators - one in sonar that could configure and operate the system, and another on the conn for the O-gangers to monitor and point at. The only controls they had were volume and display brightness.
What was cool about the system was like a good radar detector, it had five different-sounding alarms, so you could tell what kind of signal was being detected when it lit off without having to monitor the receiver. Threat frequencies for sonars of interest could be programmed into it along with a set of bad-guy active torpedo sonar frequencies.
The alarms were: Low Freq Detect, low Freq Threat, High Freq Detect, High Freq Detect, and the one that got you to break a suction on your seat real fast and check out the display - Torpedo Detect, which was a high-pitched, repeating beep.
Whales were particularly adept at setting off the alarms, along with our squeaky fairwater planes during one very long patrol.
To the best of my knowledge, this series of sonar was never shared with any other country.
So when you see the elongated dome on Cold War boats, now you know what they are. The smaller, high freq. dome is usually on the forward portion of the sail, and is about a foot in height.
The fairing that is being called a GNATs is most likely a radio buoy. Attack boats carried very small buoys and boomers carried much larger, winged buoys. They looked a lot like the "Fat Man" fission bomb but with wings. The Tridents carried a different version, but like everything else on the boat, they were large. All carried a sail-mounted floating wire.
We carried a GNATs for a few months which looked like a football on a pedestal. It was raised to get the target signatures we were trying to mimic to spread into the water. It was a temporary install for training other attack boats prior to them deploying on spec-ops.
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