EECS Graduate Student Receives Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2019 International Telemetering Conference

A paper written by EECS master’s student Jason Baxter received the “Best Graduate Student Paper” award at the 2019 International Telemetering Conference (ITC), held in October in Las Vegas.

In order to be considered for a student award at ITC, a paper must be authored solely by students, with minimal proofreading from faculty advisors. Baxter’s paper, titled "APSK Symbol Timing and Carrier Phase Synchronization on an FPGA in a C-Band Telemetry Receiver,” presents hardware prototyping results for a four-year, $2.5M research contract that began in 2016. In his paper, Baxter constructed a joint carrier and clock recovery system on an FPGA for an amplitude phase shift keying (APSK) signal. His fully-synchronized APSK demodulator is part of a larger prototyping effort led by Professor Erik Perrins, the aim of which is to demonstrate low density parity check (LDPC) codes paired with APSK during a flight test at Edwards Air Force Base. These flight tests are tentatively scheduled for Summer 2020.

Since 2005, KU students and faculty have had consistent participation at ITC, which is sponsored by the International Foundation for Telemetering (IFT). The IFT promotes the professional and technical interests of the telemetering community by sponsoring conferences, educational activities and technical publications. As part of its educational outreach, the IFT named KU one of its six official partner universities in 2010. The conference presents awards in student and non-student categories. This award marks the ninth won by KU researchers since 2005.

Photo: EECS Professor Erik Perrins (left) and MS student Jason Baxter (center).