A Scrapheap Challenge

From a heap of hi-tech junk to a working radar system. One of our undergraduate students rises to the challenge..

A project that many would consider impossible. Not Jonathan Hazell, whose final year undergraduate project was shotlisted in the top three in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering category of The Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) Awards, which were presented at a ceremony in Kensington Town Hall on the 28^th September 2012.

Jonathan’s project was entitled “RF electronics and optical systems ’scrapheap’ challenge”.  The challenge demonstrated his resourcefulness, ingenuity and “flying by the seat of his pants” engineering to build a radar from, literally, boxes of of scrap parts.

Raidar raider -some of the kit on the worksbench

Jonathan was given a 19” rack of old Nortel high-speed optical telecommunications equipment, developed as a 10 Gb/s research platform back in the early 1990s by his supervisor Dr Stepan Lucyszyn.  The challenge was to make something work that was different to what was intended by Nortel.  The first major obstacle was that most of the boxes were unlabeled and bespoke so Jonathan had to investigate a wide range of technologies to identify potentially useful microwave components and circuits. 

The second obstacle was that having identified the useful “scrap”, no datasheets could be found.  Because of this the microwave components and circuits had to be measured and modelled in order to design a new microwave system.  

Dr Lucyszyn described Jonathan's achievements: 'What was truly remarkable was the ingenuity he applied in characterising components, circuits and his final radar system without having any modern measurement equipment that was capable of operating at 10 GHz. To make the radar work he made up other components from scrap that was at hand, and certainly not designed to operate at such high frequencies'.  

Our undergraduate courses are designed to build on core engineering knowledge and skills and provide students with the opportunity to rise to any design challenge. With this project, Jonathan has certainly proved that anything is possible.