Date of Award

6-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Santa Clara : Santa Clara University, 2021.

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Abstract

In certain terrain types It is difficult to locate people, objects, animals, etc. In particular, using one’s eyes and ears to locate something has certain disadvantages. Visible light propagates at high frequencies and is easily stopped by terrain. Also, sound waves do not propagate as effectively as electromagnetic waves in open air because they are mechanical waves. Therefore, our goal is to create a system that can locate emitters that output electromagnetic waves in the radio frequency (RF) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS). RF operates at a lower frequency than visible light and will diffract around mountains and pass through jungle foliage more easily than light. The goal of this project is to design a system that will be compact, lightweight, and provide a signal strength/clock direction output pair to the operator indicating where the target emitter is located. Thus far we have been able to design and build a prototype system that accomplishes most of our goals. Tests with our prototype system have shown that our design concept is realizable given our system is lightweight and provides the operator with a bearing and signal strength of a target emitter. However, due to issues with our motor and motor controller, our system is unable to achieve our desired accuracy. Overall, the predominant issues we have encountered are our motor controller and motor being too weak to rotate our antenna. This issue may be remedied by increasing our budget slightly and incorporating a more powerful motor and better quality motor controller. Given the incorporation of an improved motor controller and motor, our system should be able to meet all of our original design objectives and be finalized into a compact usable product.

Download

Share

COinS