The DRS Fellowship was established in 2002 as part of the on-going partnership between DRS Signal Solutions and Virginia Tech. Specifically, the DRS Graduate Fellowship provides full tuition as well as a competitive stipend to an MS or PhD graduate student. The fellowship is highly competitive and awarded to students particularly interested in wireless research. The exact research topic is determined by the faculty coordinator Dr. R. Michael Buehrer in conjuction with DRS-SS.
The research conducted under this fellowship is open to any topic in wireless communications of mutual interest, but has primarily focused on Single Channel Direction Finding (SCDF). Previous topics also included adaptive modulation. A unique feature of this fellowship is the opportunity to implement the work on state of the art equipment. With the aid of DRS engineers each student has implemented portions of their research on DRS software defined radios. Additionally, students get the opportunity to interact with DRS engineers on a regular basis providing valuable input.
The SCDF platform consists of a software radio with a single receiver, and an eight element antenna array. The array has eight elements which are monopoles arranged around the circumference of a circle that lie on a metal groundplane. The radio controls which monopole element it is listening to by a switching control system.