Reminder to register for the 2010 IEEE international Symposium on Phased Array Systems & Technology

Hello AP-S Boston community,

Per your ongoing interest in phased array antenna systems I want to remind you to register for the 2010 IEEE international Symposium on Phased Array Systems & Technology, in our very own Waltham MA, this October :)

Check out the fascinating technical program.

Join the facebook group.

Or, if you are a student then register here for the student event, because we want to encourage the young engineers to study applied electromagnetics and eventually phased array antenna systems.

Spread the word around your workplace or school sending the flyer to all of your friends.

See you on August 25, for Bill Delany's talk on Early Phased Array Developments at Lincoln Laboratory

Greg,

Chair

IEEE AP-S Boston Chapter

Technology Goes to War, by Deborah G. Douglass, Wed. July 14, 2010

We are pleased to have Deborah G. Douglas, Curator of Science and
Technology, from the MIT Museum present Technology Goes to War:

World War II is sometimes called the "Wizards' War" because of the
extraordinary contributions made by the scientists and engineers to
the war effort. The nation's research universities were central to
this work but even among the most elite institutions, the
contributions of MIT are unparalleled. Many know of the famous MIT
Radiation Laboratory that made pioneering contributions to the
technology of radar and was the second largest wartime R&D project but
far fewer of projects such as Doc Draper's gunsights (which turned the
tide of the Navy's battle in the Pacific), the Chemical Warfare
Service Lab that transformed gas mask technology and invented gasoline
flame throwers, or Jay Forrester's early work on a flight simulator
that led to the Whirlwind computer. Dr. Douglas presents an
illustrated slide lecture that reviews the fascinating history of MIT
and the birth of the military-industrial-university complex.

This presentation will be at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory cafeteria at
6:00 PM, Wednesday, 14 July. For more information goto:
http://www.ieeeboston.org/org/subgroups/antennas_propagation.html

In preparation for this talk i am asking you to learn more about WW2
radar and optical sensor systems, gun laying computer systems, and the
feedback servo control systems used to direct the guns by visiting any
one of these local museums:

See many radar and optical systems, mechanical computer, and feedback
control systems used to precisely direct the guns of a WW2 era
battleship, you would be surprised at how sophisticated this equipment
is:
http://www.battleshipcove.org/

See the optical gun sight discussed in Debora's abstract here:
http://web.mit.edu/museum/

Visit a WW2 destroyer in Boston, loaded with the radar and optical
sensors and fire control computer system:
http://www.nps.gov/bost/historyculture/usscassinyoung.htm

Read up on the challenges of WW2 radar design (one of my favorite
books on the topic) by checking out this book at your local library:
http://www.amazon.com/Radar-History-World-War-Imperatives/dp/0750306599

Do your homework and bring some good questions for Deborah :) Feel
free to invite your friends who are interested in technological
history or military history.

Looking forward to seeing you next week!

Greg,
Chair AP-S Boston.

iPhone 4 antenna problem

Fellow antenna engineers:

If you haven't been following Apple's antenna issues with the iPhone 4 here are a couple of interesting reads:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178503/Hardware_expert_explains_iPhone_4_antenna_problem

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178771/Apple_AT_T_sued_over_iPhone_4_antenna_problems?source=toc

And yes, if you were wondering, Apple is trying to hire more antenna engineers ;)

http://jobs.apple.com/index.ajs?BID=1&method=mExternal.showJob&RID=55852&CurrentPage=1

John

Registration now open for 2010 IEEE Symposium on Phased Array Systems and Technology

Registration is now open for the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Phased Array Systems and Technology.

At this conference the latest in phased array technology will be presented, discussed, and debated.

This conference is in Waltham, so it is an easy one for the members of AP-S Boston to attend.

I strongly recommend attending if you are a fan of phased array technology, radar imaging, or antenna systems.

Greg

Chair, AP-S Boston

A DIY Synthetic Aperture Radar System

Thought the members of IEEE AP-S Boston Chapter would like to check out this project:

Recently i presented a briefing at the MIT Haystack Observatory open lunch on how to build your own synthetic aperture radar in your backyard. Others found it interesting and it has circulated among several technology blogs.

Here it is on Make Magazine

Here it is on Popular Science

Hope you find this interesting! If you build your own SAR we would like to see it too, post it here on our blog.

Stay tuned for even more interesting stuff coming up at our meeting in July.

Greg,

Chair AP-S Boston.

Cary Rappaport's publications: detecting buried mines, imaging, medical applications of applied EM

Our meeting last week was a record attendance for IEEE AP-S Boston. During which there was much debate and discussion of possible ways to image the location of underground tunnels using UHF SAR. In addition to this, there was much discussion of Cary's previous work in finding buried mines with radar sensing techniques.

I think many of our members would like to read up on Cary's previous work. Here it is, scroll down about half-way to see all publications on these topics.

Looking forward to seeing everyone at our next meeting,

6:00 PM, Wednesday, 14 July

Technology Goes to War

Deborah G. Douglas, Curator of Science and Technology, MIT Museum

Determining tunnel positions under rough surfaces with underground focused synthetic aperture radar

IEEE AP-S Boston Chapter is pleased to present this fascinating talk on determining tunnel positions using underground focused SAR. As you can guess, this technology has many relevant applications.

Feel free to invite your colleagues, we are looking forward to seeing you there;

6:00 PM, Tuesday, 8 June

Determining tunnel positions under rough surfaces with underground focused synthetic aperture radar

Carey Rappaport, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115

Underground tunnels present both military and homeland security threats since smugglers use them as transit routes for trafficking weapons, explosives, people, drugs, and other illicit materials. Detecting and imaging the presence of tunnels in any given region of ground is possible because the air that fills them is materially quite different from anything else underground. The Spotlight Synthetic Aperture Radar (SL-SAR) has been used due to its ability to scan large areas of terrain in a short amount of time, which is ideal for tunnel detection. In order to obtain strong and distinct target signals, Underground Focusing, based on ray refraction at the ground surface is being considered. This presents a challenge since the technique requires an estimation of the ground characteristics, and the random roughness of the soil surface tends to distort the reconstructed image of the analyzed geometry.

This presentation explores the impact of the surface roughness in Underground Focusing SAR imaging for tunnel detection applications. The study starts by simulating incident plane waves from 19 angles (-45 to 45 degrees) at 128 different frequencies (55 to 550 MHz) with 2-D Finite Difference Frequency Domain (FDFD) analysis on 2 different types of soil: non-dispersive sandy soil and lossy clay loam soil with 10 cm of randomly distributed roughness. It is demonstrated that a shallow tunnel can be imaged in low moisture, non-conductive sand, but that the more lossy moist clay presents too much surface clutter to distinguish the tunnel.

Carey M. Rappaport (IEEE M, SM 96, F 06) received five degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: the SB in Mathematics, the SB, SM, and EE in Electrical Engineering in June 1982, and the PhD in Electrical Engineering in June 1987. He is married to Ann W. Morgenthaler, and has two children, Sarah and Brian.

Prof. Rappaport has worked as a teaching and research assistant at MIT from 1981 until 1987, and during the summers at COMSAT Labs in Clarksburg, MD, and The Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, CA. He joined the faculty at Northeastern University in Boston, MA in 1987. He has been Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering since July 2000. During fall 1995, he was Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Electromagnetics Institute of the Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, as part of the W. Fulbright International Scholar Program. During the second half of 2005, he was a visiting research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific Industrial and Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Epping Australia. He has consulted for CACI, Alion Science and Technology, Inc., Geo-Centers, Inc., PPG, Inc., and several municipalities on wave propagation and modeling, and microwave heating and safety. He was Principal Investigator of an ARO-sponsored Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative on Humanitarian Demining, Co-Principal Investigator of the NSF-sponsored Engineering Research Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS), and Co-Principal Investigator of the DHS-sponsored Awareness and Localization of Explosive Related Threats (ALERT) Center of Excellence.

Prof. Rappaport has authored over 330 technical journal and conference papers in the areas of microwave antenna design, electromagnetic wave propagation and scattering computation, and bioelectromagnetics, and has received two reflector antenna patents, two biomedical device patents and three subsurface sensing device patents. He was awarded the IEEE Antenna and Propagation Society's H.A. Wheeler Award for best applications paper, as a student in 1986. He is a member of Sigma Xi and Eta Kappa Nu professional honorary societies.

Meeting will be held at MIT Lincoln Laboratory A-Café, 244 Wood Street, Lexington, MA. For directions please see:http://www.ll.mit.edu/about/map.html

For more information, contact Antennas & Propagation chair, Gregory Charvat at Gregory.charvat@ll.mit.edu