EAST LANSING — Michigan State University engineering students sounded the channel and won the “foxhunt” at the 2018 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Symposium Student Design Competition at 2018 antennas and propagation symposium, held July 8-13 in Boston.

The team of undergraduates Anton Schlegel and Justin Opperman and graduate students Pratik Chatterjee and Billy Stevers designed and built a radio system that located a 5 GHz radio transmitter and sounded a radio channel in real time to win the international contest.

Team advisor Jeffrey Nanzer, the Dennis P. Nyquist Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said six finalist teams were selected from around the world – MSU, Colorado School of Mines, University of Alabama, two teams from Greece, and a team from Spain — and provided with funds to build their proposed design.

“This ‘foxhunt’ allowed each team to showcase the various aspects of their design,” Nanzer said. “The team put together an outstanding design, which included a software-defined radio as a primary component. SDRs are going to play a huge role in future wireless systems. This competition gave our students critical experience which will help them in their research and future careers.”

See the MSU FoxFinder design in this video.

The team’s design and results will be published in a future edition of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine.

This story was published in Technology Century.