Award

The radio frequency (RF) spectrum from frequencies below 100 kHz to over 95 GHz has become a crowded workspace for many commercial and military communications, navigation, and sensing applications. Across the spectrum, attenuation and noise levels determine channel and band usability, dynamically impacted by atmospheric physics, lightning, solar activity, unintended interferers, and, in hostile scenarios, jammers, EMP and HEMP events. Maintaining communications in a dynamically changing RF environment requires the characterization of RF spectrum attenuation and channel use. The WRC and 0BD propose a Spectrum Attenuation Reporting Sensor System (SARSS) that employs compressed sensing coupled to an array of ultra-wideband antennas, to perform precise, non-periodic sampling of the RF spectrum, characterizing the broadband spectrum attenuation, and disseminating, to local users or across a mesh network, an estimation of the usable channels.