Falling apart, coming due, and flying out

The last couple of weeks have had some of the worst moments and the worst days I have had in a while. It will be OK; the next few weeks will have some great stuff in them.

Many of the bad things relate to how I view everything. Many small annoyances, problems, and stresses have a common solution, "If I did not live at home."

In addition to that, I had a lot of concern over my DSP class. Last night the final and paper/project for my class were due. These two items combined are 90% of my total grade. This is the summary of the project I wrote last night:

The project based itself upon a surveillance radar. This type of radar is used primarily for locating an object and roughly finding its velocity. It used a pulsed wave so the same antenna could be used to send and receive signals.

Signal processing was done in three parts. The matched filter in the first part used FFTs to mix the original signal with the received signal. This amplified the parts of the signal where any echoes would be found. After the inverse FFT was applied, this was sent to the detector processor. Before looking for a signal, a CFAR was calculated and used to establish a detection threshold. If a hit was detected, the signal was then passed onto the next stage. At the postprocessor the highest signal was isolated so its frequency and time could be recorded. Using the transmitted signal's initial conditions as a base, these measurements were used to estimate the object's velocity and range respectively.

This project used Simulink which is a simulation tool closely related to MATLAB. Like my astrodynamics project for an earlier class, this involved me learning a lot of stuff in a new field. However, this project turned out poorly. I did not understand radar design very well, I did not know how to recreate everything on a computer, and I kept putting off doing the work.

Now I will share what I wrote in the results section:

The simulation did not work. Debugging had to stop as the project was due. The problem was providing a signal the simulation would accept.

The project was due at 11 last night and I submitted it online at 3:11 this morning.

The Final
This turned out much better than the project, but it had a couple of interesting moments. It was an at home open book test. One of the questions involved adaptive filters and neural networks. At first I thought they were related through a lattice-ladder pattern. As I looked through the textbook I found support for my idea; a FIR (finite impulse response) filter structure can be realized as a lattice structure.

Two days later I discovered I was wrong. My research led me to the MathWorks documentation. As I was trying to make sense of adaptive linear network architecture, I had the strange feeling I was actually reading something fictitious. The algorithms were described as learning how to do things on their own.

The Next Part
Between now and Christmas I will be spending more time away from home than at home. I will develop the details as things happen or after I have pictures and stories to share. For now you should know several states and several feet of snow will be involved.

There are still many things I have to do, but some of them are things I want to do.