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Bagley
Intern/Mentor G/T Pd. 1
15 January 2016
Reflection Paper
Working in the Air and Missile Defense sector at the Johns Hopkins University Applied
Physics Lab has been everything I thought it would beand more. Im an ASPIRE Intern, and as
such I work with a team of interns (Anyka, Syona, Isabella, and Anina) towards building a shortrange, Doppler-sensing, Synthetic Aperture Radar. My mentor, Julius Verzosa, along with his
office mate, Reid McCargar, supervise us as we design and build circuit paths, generate Matlab
code to control and interpret a signal running through the circuit, create Graphical User
Interfaces (GUIs) to assist anyone who wishes to control the radar, and finally, build the radar
itself. The radar will be used primarily to detect the position of an object in an open field, and as
it gets more refined, to detect the motion of that object in a more crowed environment. As its
name implies, the SAR radar will eventually perform inverse SAR as it tracks the motion of a
moving aerial vehicle, such as a small drone, and help it land autonomously.
About a year ago, I was skeptical of the Intern-Mentor program as a whole. Seeing my
friends stay up until 4 AM working on their midterms several hours before they were due made
me question the return on investment on dealing with a weekly research commitment on top of
several significant course work assignments. After reluctantly applying and getting accepted, my
work so far has been the absolute converse of what I expected; the daunting assignments that I so
to make variables available to all classes (global) or hidden (non-global), and from what Ive
seen so far, Im guessing this will be incredibly useful for multi-person projects where variable
names may change from function to function, or remain the same across all functions. I plan on
making the Vote Machine a lot more complex in the coming weeks, which will tremendously
build my skill in the scripting language.
Finishing large milestones are always extremely memorable, some of which have been
completing a working low-pass filter and getting impedance measurements for our antennae. As
a first-year Electricity & Magnetism student, I can attest that building a circuit of the caliber of
the low-pass filter was no easy feat, considering I had almost no knowledge of any electronics
devices at the time it was built. After many weeks of trial-and-error, dozens of internet searches
for any morsel of a hint, and several learned lessons about the importance of continual
documentation, we proved that the filter worked by observing, using an oscilloscope, the
accelerated attenuation of a generated frequency as the frequency increased. Building the filter
made building the accompanying component, a simple amplifier, much easier. Using a Site
Master Voltage Standing Wave Ratio (VSWR) measuring device, we were able to measure the
impedance, or operational electrical resistance, of the antennas for our radar model. As we have
learned, networking is both very crucial and consequently, accessible at APL. We talked to a
specialist in hardware named Cristina, who helped us become familiar with the device, and we
learned a lot about the importance of quality connections (the cheapest high-frequency BNC
cables can run $500!).
As it currently stands, all of the components of the radar have been designed, many
preliminary componentsincluding the circuit board, antennae, and amplifiers and mixers
have been built, and we are currently waiting to integrate the entire electronic system. I would
like to see this radar far surpass the first model that was built this past summer by accurately
obtaining distance readings in a number of environments. One key to achieving this benchmark
will be to develop our code using sound physics and logic, and I plan on doing a lot a Matlab
review to make this possible. After we achieve a working radar, we will start to uncover the true
fruits of radio-frequency devices as we employ Doppler and SAR techniques towards modeling
the previously mentioned path of a small drone.