Almost nobody uses single crystal for this sort of thing, it is way too expensive, PZT 5A or 5H is common, cheap and good enough for short range acoustic modems, single crystal is expensive to the point that it is still pretty much a research subject with a few military applications.
Here:
**broken link removed** are some tutorials on these materials and how to apply them (From the web site of one of our suppliers).
If you must use that existing hydrophone design (Which is awful by the way), I would firstly try running the thing at a few Khz, tune around a bit to find the frequency that gives the maximum tone level in the water, then hook up your hydrophone and make sure you can see the tone on a FFT (Just record it with something like audacity and use the spectrum view).
Make sure you can see both tones clearly.
I would then advocate the use of the overlapped Gortzel algorithm to pick out the two tones, and feed them to whatever decoder makes sense.
Over less then a meter even with fairly awful gear this should be easy to get to work, getting a good data rate might be another story, but you should be able to at least see both tones on an fft or output of a gortzel filter.
However I would really suggest begging or borowing a couple of real transducers from someone, maybe a local university or such, I think you will be much happier with a couple of transducers made for the purpose rather then trying to use gear designed for air under water.
I would offer to sell you some new ones but suspect that money may be an issue.
Still if you want to see the sort of thing used for this stuff professionally, I work here:
https://www.neptune-sonar.co.uk
Regards, Dan.