Radar Technology Paper Wins Award

A recent UT Dallas graduate received the award for best student paper at the Fourth International IEEE Waveform Diversity and Design Conference, a major annual event in the field of radar technology.

Lance Schmieder’s paper, “Signal Direction Finding for Low Complexity Radar,” reports on the creation of an algorithm that provides improved and low-cost performance in suppressing interference to radar systems, especially from jamming devices.

“My paper shows that a low-cost radar system, not originally designed to operate amidst jamming, can greatly reduce its susceptibility with a low-complexity approach we devised,” he said.

The paper sprang from Schmieder’s work on his master’s thesis, but he’s not done with the topic yet.

“All algorithms have to start with some assumptions,” he explained. “For example, in the paper we assume that the interference has equal power in all the receiver channels. This is often a good assumption, but not always. I would like to be able to relax this assumption and make the algorithm more generally applicable.”

Now a system analyst at Mustang Technology Group in Allen, Texas, Schmieder attributed his graduate education at UT Dallas to giving him a solid grasp of the fundamentals of his field. He also praised his academic adviser, M. Saquib, an associate professor of electrical engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering & Computer Science at UT Dallas.

“Dr. Saquib is great at inspiring his students to do their best,” he said. “For me, that meant inspiring me to go beyond simply fulfilling the thesis requirements, and that led to getting published and ultimately receiving this award.”

Schmieder’s co-authors were his friend Don Mellon, a radar consultant who specializes in adaptive signal processing, and Dr. Saquib.

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