Appeal No. 96-4183 Application 08/235,625 reviewed the disclosures of Lord, Cox, Ely, Hoyle, Schuster, Moser, Waters, Brie and Hsu as they relate to Kent, but have found nothing in these references that would have motivated a person of ordinary skill in the art to modify the apparatus disclosed in Kent so that the receiving step takes place at the drill collar, where the transmitting step takes place. Therefore, we will not sustain the rejections of claim 7 as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 103 based on the use of Kent as the primary reference. As each of the independent method claims recite a step of receiving an emitted acoustic signal at a location on the drill collar and each of the independent apparatus claims recite that the receiver is mounted on a drill collar, we also will not sustain the rejections as to claims 10- 16 and 19-24 based on the use of Kent as the primary reference. The decision of the examiner is reversed. 8Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 NextLast modified: November 3, 2007