Brandon Ravenscroft Dissertation Talk

I got to say, it feels pretty great. It's the culmination of, it's been seven years of work. Now, it's a big relief that it's all over because it's been a really busy last few months between finishing the dissertation, putting the presentation together, and I'm moving next week to go start my new job. It's all been really busy. And it didn't really hit me until after I got out and it was over. It's like, well, the biggest part of it's done. So it's definitely a relief. It's not bragging, I'm saying it's not unexpected, but it's just you always have that a little bit of concern and it's it's good to know that everybody, including your committee, thought highly of your work. Yeah.

"Nice. And so how, how was the questioning, how was the sort of in defense sort of experience, how how did that feel?"

It felt okay. It wasn't really too overwhelming. There were some questions that got a couple of questions that seems looking confusing. But something I learned a while back or a long time ago just kind of helps us just talk through it. Just maybe asked to have them repeat a different way or kind of pro more so it doesn't get overwhelming to you.

Just grew up here around Kansas City area. I always had an interest in electronics and math and all that kind of stuff. Did well in school growing up. And everybody's like, well, you should be an engineer and did a little bit of college, right out of high school. Went in the field and worked. And then got to a point like, well, I want to go back and finish school. Came back to KU and went 2012, got my bachelor's degree in 2015, and then started working for Dr. Blunt. And then just done a bunch of internships during the summer at different places and just, yeah, just now finished the dissertation.

It had to have been courses I took in senior year. Dr. Allen had an Intro to Radar course and that was really interesting to me, just the application, but specifically some of the processing techniques you do. I thought it was really cool. What happened? I'm like, yeah, this is something I could really enjoy as a career wise, something I really enjoy. And then eventually, Dr. Blunt reached out to me since he has had a budding research group at the time that's grown quite a bit. He touched out to me and I said, I'll give it a try. And just the more I did, the more I enjoyed it. So I decided I want to make a career out of it.

Radar in general, a lot of it's just, you know, it's not like a radio and like radio or cell phone communications where you just have like a one way link here radar, you know, you're going like two way link. You're putting energy out there and then you're getting energy back from what's out there. So it has a much more, what's called a dynamic range problem. You can transmit a lot of power and get very little back. There's really creative techniques to pull out what's out there. The characteristics of it, Is it stationary? Is it moving? things like that. You can form synthetic images. Basically with radar that can do things even optical can't. You can look through a terrible thunderstorm from an airborne platform and see exactly what the ground looks like. Things like that I thought to be really the most powerful tools for radar.

Essentially the problem I'm looking at is radar systems. A lot of them legacy, meaning they've been around for a while. They're meant to operate at certain spectrum frequencies. Whereas you think of a frequency, you might think of your radio station, 97.1 or whatever, megahertz, that's a frequency spectrum. Your cell phones operate at certain frequencies, 800, 900 Mhz, 2.4 Ghz, things like that. A lot of those operating bands, radars we're in are really attractive for communications, especially like 4G and now 5G. And they need to get larger bandwidths, take up more of that to get more data to users to get these really high data rates. The actual bands that radars once had are now, they've been auctioned off by the FCC. They've raised some of the effect of several hundred billion dollar in the last 15 years just selling off those to commercial companies. That's left a lot of radar systems with a burden of, well, we need to either figure out how to cohabitate with them in a certain region or move somewhere else. So my research really looked at on techniques to cohabitate, coexist with those systems without the radar actually having to move to a different frequency band because that's often very expensive. It requires complete new hardware, not just the processing techniques afterwards requires complete new hardware and everything which can be really expensive.

Well, one way would be as far as the ability of being able to cohabitate the radar and the communication systems. That means that, you know, wider amounts of bandwidth or larger amounts of a little more high speed communications. For wireless, wireless communications, you could say get higher data rates on your phone, things like that. And that could continue just to increase as the, you know, you go from 4G now to 5G and further G generations of communications.

"So it could be, would this be like faster, I guess, data processing that they would experience?"

They could receive faster data rates. They would be able to as far as downloading and uploading, downlink, uplink of data because everybody is chatting HD video on your phone, games, all that sort of stuff simultaneously.

I'd say highly overall, it's been positive. I mean, the first three years I was here in Nichols Hall and before we moved down to our new building. But I'd say it's been highly positive. I've really enjoyed all my faculty advisor and all the faculty that's been on my committee have all been really helpful. You know, all the way down to building personnel. And everybody else has always been really helpful. I've never really had any issues working here, I would say, or any regrets or any problems, so to speak.

I would say the ability to sounds kind of odd, but to be, to know what you don't know. Because it gets to a point where sometimes you get overwhelmed when you first start. Especially in a research group, you just don't realize what you don't know until you don't know it. But trying to figure out exactly what you don't know and the steps to take to get to a position where you do know something and how you can. Biggest thing just building a tool box of different capabilities and techniques. As you go through your courses and research, you develop different, I guess say tools to deal with certain issues, different problems. And once you get those built up, then you can really tackle any new problem that comes at you in a methodical way and be successful.

Definitely I'm planning on. In fact, when going to new employer, just expanding upon a lot of the research I've done here, I'd like to see a lot of it actually used in fielded systems. Whether it be for more communications applications or a radar application itself. I would like to have stuff out there that's being physically used and it's actually benefiting people. It's doing good.