Jon Owens Dissertation Talk

I have a interesting background, people ask me, why did you choose engineering? My dad was an engineer, two of my sisters were an engineer. I had many family members that set that preface, and I was good at math, and here I am. I started my undergraduate career here at KU and did some undergraduate research under Dr. Victor Frost. That really set the stage for kind of my future graduate career. I didn't know at that point that I was going to do graduate school, but it seemed like the right thing to do given that, that research was something that really interested me, granted, that was in communications. And then kind of for graduate school, took a complete jump and went to radar. And that jump occurred because in my senior design lab, I was working with Dr. Chris Allen and he had us building an ultrasonic little radar chip. You know, it was a cheap thing, but the signal processing part of that was so interesting to me that I was like, hey, do you know anyone who might be able to fund me to go to grad school? And he said, oh, go talk to this guy, Dr. Blunt. And from there, everything just worked out. Then that research path under Dr. Blunt's advising just ended up blossoming into, well, here I am, I've fully graduated and I'm staying on his staff and I'm really looking forward to the future prospects.

Recent news, you've probably seen a lot about how some cell phones, five G LTE cell phones, have been interfering with aircrafts communication systems. This cognitive sense and notch radar approach is meant to be one way that you could potentially address that. What it does is it modifies the radar waveform to effectively just deallocate power in frequency bands where there was other communications already present. What that does is it mitigates the interference that you cause them and it also mitigates the interference that they cause you. This is one potential solution to this increasingly congested frequency space. As the spectrum gets more and more dense, approaches like this are going to be.

Depends. I may not be the ultimate authority to answer this question, but from what I understand, it depends on whether your cell phones operating in a band, the same frequency band that that plane is operating in. I forget exactly which frequency band the altimeters operate at for those radars, but oftentimes people don't turn on airplane mode. I'm pretty sure that they're not the same band necessarily. Or if they are the same band, the cell phones are low enough power that they're not really interfering. For what I had mentioned prior about communications interfering with the planes altimeters was, that was actually the base tower. So the communications tower is much higher power and it was operating in a band that the altimeters were operating in. And that was what was causing that mutual interference. Those base towers trying to communicate with cell phones, wherever the cell phones may be. I think that was really the issue there, The main issue.

Absolutely these radar systems. Let me preface this with, right now, our radio frequency spectrum is becoming really dense. There are bids going out for tens of billions of dollars for maybe a 100 Mhz chunk of bandwidth or less. Which for context, 100 Mhz in my eyes isn't a ton relative to the whole bandwidth, which is orders of magnitude bigger than that. 100 Mhz, reasonably smaller. With that spectrum becoming really, really congested, radar systems and Com systems, This is just an entire area of research right now where radar systems are trying to play nice with the Com systems, systems are trying to play nice with the radar systems and there's still a lot of ongoing talks about what the spectrum policy should be. Um, for operations. My approach was just deallocate power anywhere that there's coms located. But that assumes that the comms people want you in their band to begin with. If they purchased this band, they probably don't want you in there. There has to be some spectrum policy about spectrum sharing is what they refer to it as there are some other approaches. Dual function radar was something a colleague of mine had looked into where the communications is built into the radar system. That's more of like a joint approach, whereas mines more like, we're just going to try and cooperate with what's already out there. All ways to tackle this problem for spectrum sharing, But where I see this being useful is there are tons of radar systems out there for your car. Even recently they've been looking into autonomous driving. There's like band systems that's up at 70 Ghz. When these radar systems have to behave, when there's other autonomous radar systems in that same band, how do you disambiguate who's transmitting and which band?