One of the most important signs of a living body demonstrating its life-sustaining functions is the respiration rate. State of the art for measuring this vital sign is using a monitoring system cable connected to electrodes which are attached to the patients' skin. Especially in the case of newborn infants this method is not always suitable and causing several problems, like skin injuries, high stress levels and random loosening of the sensor. To avoid these a non-contact system is developed.

Applications in the fields of e.g. industrial image processing, image based robotic control systems and autonomous driving require high dynamic range image sensors. Conventional linear CMOS image sensors only have a limited dynamic range. To extend the dynamic range the concept of a linear self-reset pixel is implemented with several pixel variants being realized and characterized on a CMOS chip. A second topic is the design with digital readout of a cluster structure composed of a pixel matrix.

To investigate the possible interference of wind turbines with terrestrial navigation aids and Radar systems, the signals of these systems have to measured in the air space used by aircrafts or being under surveillance, respectively. From the measurements performed in areas with and without wind turbines the influence of these on the signals of terrestrial navigation and/or Radars can be derived. Drone-based and state-of-the-art electronics were used for the measurements.

The possibility to estimate the resulting DVOR bearing error caused by multiple WTs summating the known errors of the particular WTs is investigated. The linear addition is found to be not suitable for use as a worst case estimation. Good estimations are achieved by the geometrical addition in proximal operation distances. In general bearing errors are decreasing with rising distance of WT and analysis point from DVOR. So the estimations can be interpreted as a kind of worst case values.

The increasing availability of off-the-shelf high frequency components makes radar measurement become popular in mainstream industrial applications. We present a cooperative radar for strongly reflective environments, being devised for a range of up to approx. 120 m. The target is designed with an unambiguous signature method. A prototype is built with commercial semiconductor components that operates in the 24 GHz band. First experimental results taken in sewage pipes are presented.

In an intercomparison organized within the framework of the German Calibration Service (Deutscher Kalibrierdienst – DKD), seven different calibration laboratories participated in the measurement of the antenna factor for three different antennas according to different standards. Between August 2017 and April 2018, measurements have been performed on a hybrid antenna, a logarithmic-periodic antenna and on an Open Ended Waveguide.

An intercomparison in the framework of the German Calibration Service (Deutscher Kalibrierdienst – DKD) was carried out. Two different travelling standards were used to measure the rise time of a pulse generator and the rise time, bandwidth and attenuation of an oscilloscope. Fourteen participants performed the measurements from September 2015 until May 2016. The overall results show that the measurements of the participating laboratories are in good agagreement with the reference values.

An existing analytical transmission line model to describe propagation properties of coplanar waveguides including parasitic effects was extended to take into account surface roughness of conductor traces. The influence of those parasitics is successively included in the simulation and compared to measurements. The device under test (DUT) was fabricated on an ceramic wafer. Propagation characteristics were measured up to 120 GHz.

We present first numerical examples of how the framework of isogeometric boundary element methods, in the context of electromagnetism also known as method of moments, can be used to achieve higher accuracies by elevation of the degree of basis functions. Our numerical examples demonstrate the computation of the electric field in the exterior domain.

In this paper we explain a novel method to increase the bandwidth of a top-loaded monopole antenna by using a shield made of dispersive magnetic material. We apply the Kramers-Kronig transforms to derive physically correct real and imaginary parts of the dispersive magnetic material. We aim at a compensation of the electric by a magnetic stored energy for a wide frequency range. Independent numerical solutions using the commercial field solver CST support the results of our investiagation.

A substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) replacing a costly rectangular waveguide is used with transverse slots edged in the top cover of the SIW as effective leaky-wave antenna with radiation direction parallel to the antenna (end-fire) until to 60 degree upwards by frequency scanning. The efficiency is optimized by a procedure leading to a 99 per cent efficiency at end-fire. With special feeding and power dividing circuits, a two-branch antenna could be designed with a further improved gain.

Near-field far-field transformations are commonly performed for time-harmonic fields. Considering in-situ measurement scenarios with given transmission signals, time-varying aspects of modulated signals have to be taken into consideration. Two methods for the measurement of modulated fields are investigated and characterized, which work with a time-domain representation of the radiated fields and, at the same time, allow to employ the standard time-harmonic near-field far-field transformation.

Radar is well known for its utilization in the aeronautical and the automotive sector. Affordable systems have started conquering safety relevant applications as permanent monitoring units. New applications also entail new challenges. The paper investigates the effects of signal degrading sediments and assesses them. It is pointed out that liquid water has a particularly negative influence. In order to limit this disturbance factor, a methodology is presented to weaken its impact by up to 75 %.

Modern integrated circuits for wireless communication include several receive and transmit path as well as large digital blocks for signal processing. Due to the complexity of these system only event-driven simulation are fast enough for system simulation. This work describes the development of a fast and accurate event-driven frequency divider model with special focus on its transfer characteristic of harmful spurious tones. A simulation example of a receiver is given.

A target simulator for RFID direction of arrival estimation systems is proposed. This simulator can be used in the evaluation of such systems and offers a method for fast, economical and, above all, reproducible and transferable analysis of their performance. Signal models and descriptions of two typical detrimental propagation effects are derived. The developed system structure and hardware modules are presented and exemplary evaluation results are given, showing the application of this method.

In this work, silver and gold nanoparticle inks were printed by a consumer inkjet printer on eco-friendly substrates like paper and PET in order to make the RFID tag manufacturing process less harmful to the ecosystem. A dipole antenna was designed and based on this design, simulations of the greener tags are presented and compared as a proof of concept for the different materials. First measurements are conducted and simulations with the optimized antenna designs are shown.

This work presents a deep learning approach to classify road users as pedestrians, cyclists or cars using a lidar sensor for detection and a radar sensor for classification. A dataset was gathered on urban roads to train and test the deep learning algorithms. The results show that the system reliably classifies cars, but has trouble with pedestrians and cyclists. The results are improved after aggregating decisions with a Bayes filter. Overlapping targets remain a challenge for the system.

Synthetic Aperture Radar is an efficient solution for traffic monitoring due to its high spatial resolution and independence from daylight and weather conditions. This paper presents a fast processor based on the powerful post-Doppler space-time adaptive processing technique. The algorithm has great potential for real-time processing, decreased hardware complexity and low costs compared to state-of-the-art systems. It is tested using real 4-channel data acquired with the DLR’s airborne F-SAR.

Today's wireless transceivers are demanding for lowest power consumption to support long battery lifetime. These architectures utilize dutycycle schemes based on ultra-low-power (ULP) oscillators to reduce power consumption. These ULP oscillators are either using external components increasing the cost or they need calibration techniques to achieve absolute accuracy. This work presents an improved ULP calibration technique overcoming typical limitations of settling time and calibration accuracy.

Using the method of modal parameters, developed earlier, equations for the Singularity Expansion Method (SEM) poles were obtained. Numerical investigation of solutions for the poles of the fist layer have shown good agreement with analytical and numerical results obtained earlier.

A fundamental for an automated driving car is the awareness of its surrounding road participants. Current approach to gather this awareness is to sense the environment by on-board sensors. In the future, Vehicle-to-X (V2X) might be able to improve the awareness. We propose to create synthetic data for investigating cooperative perception by a simulation tool. Therefore, Artery and its counterpart SUMO is extended by modelling realistic vehicle dynamics and probabilistic sensor models.

This article investigates the properties of dielectric corner reflectors for use in a number of millimeter wave applications, such as road safety for autonomous driving. Material characterizations of different typical plastics using transmission measurements are presented, as well as an analysis of their respective radar cross section (RCS) when used as corner reflectors. They exhibit similar behavior as conventional metallic reflectors, while intrinsic dielectric losses reduce the overall RCS.

Phase height measurements of low frequency radio waves are used to study the long-term variability of the mesosphere over Europe. But a refinement of this measurements suggest that it must be considered as one that only reflects integral properties of the hole region from the mesosphere over the stratosphere down to the troposphere. The sole coupling of these measurements to the mesosphere must be dropped.

We analyze tidal phases and related wind shear in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere as observed by a meteor radar. The wind shear phases are compared with those of sporadic E occurrence rates, which were derived from GPS radio occultation observations. We find good correspondence between radar derived wind shear and sporadic E phases for the semidiurnal, terdiurnal, and quarterdiurnal tidal components, but not for the diurnal tide.

In April 2018 the PMWE1 sounding rocket campaign was conducted at the Andøya Space Center involving coordinated measurements with rockets and ground instruments to measure parameters relevant for testing of the existing theories of PMWE formation. The Middle Atmosphere Alomar Radar System (MAARSY) was operated to detect PMWE with multiple beam directions. The Saura MF radar was operated with a multiple beam experiment to derive horizontal winds and electron density profiles.