Small Business and Antenna Design Focus Day: Monday, September 28, 2009

8:00 – 9:00 Registration And Coffee

9:00 - 10:00 SBIR Opportunities For Military Antennas

Find out your best avenues of success for creating award-winning proposals!

Small Business Innovation Research provides funding for high-tech research and development initiatives. Small businesses have often benefited from this program, allowing dedicated service providers to grow into larger businesses with several DoD contracts under their belt. How do these companies land numerous awards? It all begins with the opportunities out there. This session will guide you through the process of finding the right opportunities for your organization, and how you can use them to your advantage. This session’s leader will help you understand the approval process, and what your organization needs to do in order to land a coveted SBIR award.

How you will benefit:

  • Explore several options for finding the SBIR program appropriate to your project
  • Discuss with peers the important issues within the antennas community in order to determine which of your programs can generate more success for you

What you will learn:

  • Several opportunities for small businesses that you did not think were out there
  • The whole SBIR award approval process, as applied to antenna design and deployment
  • How to create award-winning proposals

Session Leader:

Dr. Joseph R. Guerci
IEEE Fellow and Warren D. White Award Recipient 2007
IDGA Advisory Board Member

10:00 - 11:30 Winning An SBIR Award: Tricks Of The Trade

As a continuation to the previous session, this workshop will delve deeper into the requirements for creating winning proposals. Hearing from an actual SBIR award-winner will allow you to learn the entire process of proposal conceptualization, and the necessary steps it takes for you to communicate your goals for successful project implementation.

At the end of this session, you should be able to come up with a checklist of requirements so that you can succeed – organizationally and financially – in creating an ideal proposal to benefit your company.

How you will benefit:

  • Understand the requirements of SBIR solicitations
  • Gain insight into case studies of winning proposals
  • Find out what happens and what to do after you win an award

What you will learn:

  • Step-by-step process of creating a winning proposal
  • The necessary means to communicate your program’s goals in an effective manner
  • How to work hand-in-hand with the DoD for antenna technology advancement

Session Leader:

C. David Massey
Director for Business Development
First RF Corporation

11:30 - 1:30 Situational Awareness For Air, Land And Sea Systems General Atomics

1:30 – 3:30 Body-Centric Antennas And Networks

Discover the latest in warfighter-mounted antenna systems!

Recently, there has been a growing interest in body area networks (BANs), which play an important role in body-centric wireless communications. The ability to model and simulate these networks is crucial to their design – as a complement to measurements that are essential but quite tedious and time-consuming in nature. The objective of this session is to focus on the problems of ultrawideband UWB antenna design and propagation modeling, using a versatile computational EM (CEM) solver GEMS.

This session will include illustrative numerical results for the propagation and coupling problems, and will discuss some designs for wideband antennas that make them useful for the application at hand, because of their conformal nature and desirable radiation characteristics.

How you will benefit:

  • Discover the problems and solutions of untrawideband antenna design
  • Gain insight into saving time and money for your organization by simulating the design and propagation of each antenna system before deployment

What you will learn about:

  • Body area networks
  • Ultrawideband antenna design
  • Propagation modeling

Session Leader:

Raj Mittra
Professor of Electrical Engineering
Pennsylvania State University

3:30 – 5:30 Body Wearable Diversity Antenna Systems For Increased Antenna Performance

Gain insight into the design behind multi-functional, wearable antenna systems!

Current body wearable antenna systems are being designed under the Tactical Networking Communications Antennas ATO for the Land Warrior/Ground Soldier Systems Soldier ensembles to support wideband (225-1000 MHz) and broadband (1350-2700) MHz communications. These frequency bands are particularly vulnerable to signal cancellations due to multipath. Diversity techniques employed with these antennas decrease multipath and thereby increase the overall link system gain. Improved system gain translates into higher throughputs, increased range and more flexible use of the Army’s tactical radio systems. This workshop will present comprehensive design and demonstration of body wearable diversity antennas that can increase channel capacity and improve communication links. Size, weight, and power (SWAP) minimization will be the focus to realize practical diversity antennas for body-worn communications.

How you will benefit:

  • Discover antenna design requirements, as presented by warfighter case studies
  • Find out more about designing small, multifunctional antennas designed for warfighter movement in theater

What you will learn:

  • Performance of current warfighter-wearable antennas and points of improvement
  • Design guidelines for multifunctional, wearable antennas
  • Overall benefits to creating small and cost-effective antenna systems

Session Leaders:

C. J. Reddy
Chief Technology Officer
Applied EM Inc.