Great Impedance Match for Knowledge Transfer:
Amateur Radio as part of Electrical and Computer Engineering Education
Abstract - The amateur radio community is well known for its creativity and ingenuity in their projects constructed with a modest budget and basic laboratory equipment. The Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) community is known for its innovation and world-changing impact. When these two communities meet in the world of electrical and computer engineering education, great outcomes await for faculty and students. This presentation talks about how a university makes these connections to help student success. A starting point is to encourage students to take the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) amateur radio examination early on in their college education in order to get exposure to advanced topics in ECE well in advance of when they take courses on the topic. A second initiative is to encourage student creativity to design and implement their own projects, using amateur radio, in formal and informal laboratory settings of the University curriculum. Finally, amateur radio provides a rich set of topics for senior and graduate level project/thesis activity. This presentation will provide examples of how these amateur radio/ECE interactions occur along with specific project examples that demonstrate that amateur radio is still on the forefront of project innovation.
Dennis Derickson, Amateur Radio call sign AC0P, received his BS, MS, and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from South Dakota State University (1981), the University of Wisconsin in Madison (1982) and the University of California in Santa Barbara (1992). His farming background and youth ham radio hobby heavily influenced his career in engineering. He worked on spectrum and network analyzer measurement equipment at Hewlett Packard (HP) in Santa Rosa, CA in the 1980’s. His Ph.D research focused on high-speed optoelectronics. He joined the Electrical Engineering faculty at Cal Poly in 2005 and was department chair from 2010-2020. He is a founding member of the start-up company Insight Photonics Solutions that is commercializing research initiated at Cal Poly. His outreach activities include summer science camps and robotics programs for local schools.