A Descriptive Study of Cyber Charter Schools in Pennsylvania

The purpose of this descriptive, qualitative study was to explore what the cyber directors believed the present state of cyber schools in Pennsylvania to be and what were their views of cyber schools for the future. Through this investigation, the researcher analyzed the impact of the developments that are currently taking place in the cyber schools and across the state of Pennsylvania. The researcher interviewed nine of the eleven cyber charter school C.E.O.'s in regard to their cyber school and what the future holds for all cyber charter schools across the state. Some of the major findings in the study appeared as three distinct themes. The C.E.O.'s use internal and external sources for professional development on a wide variety of topics, which differed from school to school. That there are statewide changes occurring that could affect cyber charter schools and the money that they receive per student. House Bill 446, if passed, would put a limit on the amount of money cyber charter schools receive for regular and special education students. Lastly, the C.E.O.'s foresee changes in traditional brick and mortar schools so that they can compete with cyber charter schools. Some of these changes could be an increase in the amount of technology used in brick and mortar schools or others such as the offering of online courses

Experimental Analysis of Reinforcement Learning Techniques for Spectrum Sharing Radar

In this work, we first describe a framework for the application of Reinforcement Learning (RL) control to a radar system that operates in a congested spectral setting. We then compare the utility of several RL algorithms through a discussion of experiments performed on Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. Each RL technique is evaluated in terms of convergence, radar detection performance achieved in a congested spectral environment, and the ability to share 100MHz spectrum with an uncooperative communications system. We examine policy iteration, which solves an environment posed as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) by directly solving for a stochastic mapping between environmental states and radar waveforms, as well as Deep RL techniques, which utilize a form of Q-Learning to approximate a parameterized function that is used by the radar to select optimal actions. We show that RL techniques are beneficial over a Sense-and-Avoid (SAA) scheme and discuss the conditions under which each approach is most effective.Comment: Accepted for publication at IEEE Intl. Radar Conference, Washington DC, Apr. 2020. This is the author's version of the wor

Detection and classification of buried dielectric anomalies using a separated aperture sensor and a neural network discriminator

Includes bibliographical references.The problem of detection and classification of buried dielectric anomalies using a separated aperture microwave sensor and an artificial neural network discriminator was considered. Several methods for training and data representation were developed to study the trainability and generalization capabilities of the networks. The effect of the architectural variation on the network performance was also studied. The principal component method was used to reduce the volume of the data and also the dimension of the weight space. Simulation results on two types of targets were obtained which indicated superior detection and classification performance when compared with the conventional methods

Sudoku Inspired Designs for Radar Waveforms and Antenna Arrays

Sudoku puzzles, often seen in magazines and newspapers, are logic-based challenges where each entry within the puzzle is comprised of symbols adhering to row, column and box constraints. Previously, we had investigated their potential in frequency-hopped waveforms to achieve desirable radar ambiguity functions and compared them with random, as well as the more familiar Costas sequences. This paper further examines the properties of Sudoku codes in more detail through computational search and analysis. We examine the co-hit and cross-hit arrays, defined as the correlation between two sequences, to quickly and efficiently evaluate numerous Sudoku puzzles. Additionally, we investigate the use of Sudoku puzzles for antenna applications, including array interleaving, array thinning and random element spacing

Static and Moving Target Imaging Using Harmonic Radar

Nonlinear radar exploits the difference in frequency between radar waves that illuminate and are reflected from electromagnetically nonlinear targets. Harmonic radar is a special type of nonlinear radar that transmits one or multiple frequencies and listens for frequencies at or near their harmonics. Nonlinear radar differs from traditional linear radar by offering high clutter rejection and is particularly suited to the detection of devices containing metals and semiconductors. Examples include tags for tracking insects, tags worn by humans for avoiding collisions with vehicles, or for monitoring vital signs. Such tags contain a radio-frequency (RF) nonlinearity, often a Schottky diode, connected to a suitable antenna. Targets with inherent nonlinearities, such as metal contacts, semiconductors, transmission lines, antennas, filters, and ferroelectrics, also respond to nonlinear radar. In this paper, the successful exploitation of harmonic radar for moving target imaging and synthetic aperture imaging of targets, while suppressing clutter signals from linear targets, are presented. Our results demonstrate some unique advantages of harmonic radar over its traditional linear counterpart

Harmonic response vs. target orientation: a preliminary study of the effect of polarization on nonlinear junction detection

When an electromagnetically-nonlinear radar target is illuminated by a high-power stepped-frequency probe, a sequence of harmonics is unintentionally emitted by that target. Detection of the target is accomplished by receiving stimulated emissions somewhere in the sequence, while ranging is accomplished by processing amplitude and phase recorded at multiple harmonics across the sequence. The strength of the harmonics reflected from an electronic target depends greatly upon the orientation of that target (or equivalently, the orientation of the radar antennas). Data collected on handheld wireless devices reveals the harmonic angular-dependence of commercially-available electronics. Data collected on nonlinearly-terminated printed circuit boards implies the origin of this dependency. The results of this work suggest that electronic targets may be classified and ultimately identified by their unique harmonic-response-vs.-angle patterns

Hardware Design of a High Dynamic Range Radio Frequency (RF) Harmonic Measurement System

Radio frequency (RF) circuit elements that are traditionally considered to be linear frequently exhibit nonlinear properties that affect the intended operation of many other RF systems. Devices such as RF connectors, antennas, attenuators, resistors, and dissimilar metal junctions generate nonlinear distortion that degrades primary RF system performance. The communications industry is greatly affected by these unintended and unexpected nonlinear distortions. The high transmit power and tight channel spacing of the communication channel makes communications very susceptible to nonlinear distortion. To minimize nonlinear distortion in RF systems, specialized circuits are required to measure the low level nonlinear distortions created from traditionally linear devices, i.e., connectors, cables, antennas, etc. Measuring the low-level nonlinear distortion is a difficult problem. The measurement system requires the use of high power probe signals and the capability to measure very weak nonlinear distortions. Measuring the weak nonlinear distortion becomes increasingly difficult in the presence of higher power probe signals, as the high power probe signal generates distortion products in the measurement system. This paper describes a circuit design architecture that achieves 175 dB of dynamic range which can be used to measure low level harmonic distortion from various passive RF circuit elements

The Spectrum Analysis Solution (SAS) System: Theoretical Analysis, Hardware Design and Implementation

This paper describes a multichannel super-heterodyne signal analyzer, called the Spectrum Analysis Solution (SAS), which performs multi-purpose spectrum sensing to support spectrally adaptive and cognitive radar applications. The SAS operates from ultrahigh frequency (UHF) to the S-band and features a wideband channel with eight narrowband channels. The wideband channel acts as a monitoring channel that can be used to tune the instantaneous band of the narrowband channels to areas of interest in the spectrum. The data collected from the SAS has been utilized to develop spectrum sensing algorithms for the budding field of spectrum sharing (SS) radar. Bandwidth (BW), average total power, percent occupancy (PO), signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), and power spectral entropy (PSE) have been examined as metrics for the characterization of the spectrum. These metrics are utilized to determine a contiguous optimal sub-band (OSB) for a SS radar transmission in a given spectrum for different modalities. Three OSB algorithms are presented and evaluated: the spectrum sensing multi objective (SS-MO), the spectrum sensing with brute force PSE (SS-BFE), and the spectrum sensing multi-objective with brute force PSE (SS-MO-BFE)

Adaptable Bandwidth for Harmonic Step-Frequency Radar

A spectrum sensing technique is described which is used to enhance the performance of harmonic step-frequency radar in the presence of harmful radio frequency (RF) interference (RFI). This technique passively monitors the RF spectrum for subbands of high signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) within a constrained bandwidth of interest. An optimal subband is selected for the harmonic radar that maximizes SINR and minimizes the range resolution cell size, two conflicting objectives. The approach is tested using an experimental setup that injects high power RFI into a harmonic step-frequency radar, which significantly degrades radar performance. It is shown that the proposed spectrum sensing technique significantly improves the SINR and the peak-to-average sidelobe power level of the harmonic radar at the sacrifice of range resolution