RF Laboratory
COMMUNICATIONS LAB
The Communications Laboratory has been named after James Butch, who has donated to the WVU Tech $125,000 to develop an RF laboratory. The Communication Lab houses the RF Laboratory, Network Laboratory and TIMS Communications Learning System.
The RF Laboratory
Dr. Uf Tureli brought with him his distributed RF testbed from Stevens Institute of Technology in January 2008.
The testbed is funded through $72K US Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant. The grant was intended to fund the development of a 10 node cross layer testbed to support cross layer research. Dr. Uf Tureli was awarded in December 2008 a $40,000 WV Higher Education Research Council Innovations grant to support this testbed and allow purchasing oscillators and additional microwave hardware to support extending the range of communications to 800MHz -2.8GHz and RF front ends to up/down convert to 4.7-6.1GHz capability.
Dr. Tureli had two senior design groups work on analog and digital portions of the testbed. These students built example prototypes of wireless transceivers which can implement 2×2 multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communications from 800-2.8GHz and RF front ends to up/down convert to 4.7-6.1GHz capability. This was not an easy task because the RF laboratory did not have any RF measurement hardware.
An Agilent Spectrum Analyzer N1996A which can go up to 6 GHz was purchased in Spring 2008, along with N9310 Signal Generator which can go up to 3 GHz for basic testing of designed hardware using WV Equipment Fund.
Network Laboratory
Dr. Didem Kivanc-Tureli has been supported by the WV Equipment Fund to purchase $15K GNURadio USRP and USRP2 motherboards. Dr. Didem Kivanc-Tureli has established a new course titled Software Radio and is using the new hardware in this course. WVU Tech is one of a handful universities who now has this hardware to teach both communications and networking as well as support undergraduate research to implement any communications protocol from 1 kHZ to 5.7 GHz.
Dr. Didem Kivanc-Tureli was also supported by WV HERC Instrumentation Grant for $10K to develop a sensor network laboratory. Towards, this end two different sensor network kits have been purchased. SunSpot Network hardware by Sun Networks can be programmed using high level object oriented Java language. The sensor network nodes are essentially powerful 32 bit computers which have been miniaturized in a sensor node form factor. Therefore, sensor nodes can run Java code natively without pre processing or compiling. The Crossbow classroom kit is programmed through C language. Electrical Engineering students have C language skills and Computer Engineering students have strong Java skills so the networking kits allow both program students to work with sensor networks.
Currently, the SunSpot platform is used in the laboratory of the Electrical Engineering Technology ELET 315 Measurement and Instrumentation platform for telemetry applications. A senior design group is using the Crossbow kit to develop a remote controlled robot. A new course in Sensor Networks is planned to use the Crossbow Sensor kit.
TIMS Communications Learning System
The TIMS Communications system ($20k) is a versatile Communications trainer that incorporates instruments needed for demonstrations and laboratory exercises in Introductory Communications course. The instrument was used in Spring 2009 in the ELCE 332 course for practical demonstrations of AM/FM modulation, sampling and aliasing.