Passive radar project

[abovenyquist]

This Fall semester, I was assigned a section of our "ECE4007 Senior Design" class, in which students have to (finally) design and build real things, instead of just slogging through homework sets and exams.

This was my passive radar team. The radar is "passive" in that it employs signals such as TV and radio transmissions that are already

Comments

[eliset]

They don't let engineering students do anything until their senior year?

[spambrian]

That depends on the college & the curriculum.

At Clemson, mechanical engineers have a simple design course their 2nd year. Our electrical engineering program doesn't have a design project till the senior year, but it requires concepts learned at each course level (200 through 400).

As a lab TA, I did introduce a design project in my 300-level course (ECE 371). Students had to design a working hardware interface with matching control software. The project changed a little each year, but our favorite was the home automation project. We even had a doll house built so they had a house to control.

What Aaron's students are doing here is very advanced, so it would be hard to do at an earlier point in the program.

Passive radar design project

[anonymous]

Nice project! I had a similar subject for my undergraduate thesis in my finial year at university. I would have liked a chance to experiment with the signal acquisition side of things. My thesis concentrated on the concept and theoretical side of the system. I have also started to publish some of my work online at www.ciprate.co.uk. Did you get a chance to study the power of the multi-path signals returned from the potential targets?