Random dispersive media such as the shallow-water sound channel cause the far field of a point source to be random in time and space. Consequently, resolution methods such as d.f.t., ‘maximum-likelihood estimator’ or‘maximum-entropy method’ are useful only to a limited extent for estimation of source parameters such as range, bearing or depth. This is because those methods are based on the assumption that the signal wavefront is coherent. The resolution methods can easily be generalised to the situation in which the desired signal is random. A shallow water sound propagation model is used to demonstrate the application of generalised power estimators to the problem of locating point acoustic sources in shallow water.