The Remote Educational Antenna Laboratory

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Carnegie Mellon University

This Site is Presently Under Construction

Project Summary

Electrical Engineering students taking electromagnetics at the undergraduate level often come away with the impression that the topic is abstract, mathematical, and will be of little practical use to them. Even after taking two semesters of the subject, students are often not able to see how what they have learned will help them design interesting products or systems. In contrast, after taking one or two semesters of subjects such as analog circuits, digital circuits, or control systems, a student can design and build a wide variety of interesting circuits and systems using widely available components. This difference in experience can be a factor discouraging students from further studies in electromagnetics.

One type of electromagnetic component that is practical for students to design and build is an antenna. Further, antennas are becoming increasingly important because of the explosion of wireless devices. Antennas can be simulated and analyzed using readily available design software, and can be made using techniques such as elements printed on circuit boards, and metal and dielectric parts that can be cut and assembled with hand tools.

Many Electrical Engineering programs already offer courses on antennas. These courses predominantly use software for antenna design and analysis, with few offering project courses to actually build and test antennas. A primary reason for not building antennas as part of a course is that some type of antenna range is needed to measure the radiation pattern of an antenna, and only a relatively small number of universities have such a facility. Further, many of the facilities that do exist are dedicated to research and generally not available for course use.

We are constructing an indoor antenna range within an anechoic chamber that is large enough to characterize the types of antennas that are suitable for personal electronic devices in the frequency bands between 1 and 18 GHz. Using the internet and suitable planning and scheduling arrangements, this facility will be made available for use in antenna project courses throughout the country, and potentially throughout the world. We refer to this proposed facility as the Remote Educational Antenna Laboratory, or REAL. We anticipate that this facility will play an important role in educating engineers with the knowledge needed by the wireless industry—particularly students at institutions with limited resources—and help to invigorate undergraduate courses in engineering electromagnetics by providing timely, hands-on applications through antenna design. The laboratory is being developed in collaboration with San Diego State University, and will be beta tested at San Diego State, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the University of Washington.

For further information contact:

Dan Stancil, stancil@cmu.edu

For more information on CMU Remote Laboratory Projects:

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~stancil/remote-lab

The project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.