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A radar screen is shown in the generic image.

In a future that has self-driving cars and super-fast broadband even in the planet’s most remote places, private companies are going to need a whole lot more room in the world’s airwaves.

With everything from radio stations to television broadcasters to wireless phone companies consuming large amounts of the electromagnetic spectrum — the term scientists use for the airwaves — questions have emerged about whether there is enough room up there for all the new uses companies have in mind.

A University of Kansas researcher recently was awarded a $500,000 national defense grant to help make more usable space on the spectrum. The place that he’s looking may surprise you — the range of waves used by radars that guide everything from aircraft to missiles.

Patrick McCormick — an assistant professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an assistant scientist for KU’s Institute for Information Sciences — recently received a $500,000, two-year grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

McCormick is an example of a researcher who understands what often is misunderstood by the general public — the airwaves really aren’t that crowded if you look outside of a few specific areas on the spectrum, which have become quite congested.

“The electromagnetic spectrum on average is largely vacant of signals,” McCormick said in a KU press release.

For example, the part of the spectrum used for radars has room for additional users, but the military and other entities that rely on radars would have to be assured those new users wouldn’t interfere with radar functions.

Creating technology to provide that assurance is at the heart of McCormick’s research.

“We’re going to have to be a lot more robust in how we design our processing,” McCormick said, referring to how signals on the spectrum are processed. “Our radar signal processing methods today are largely built upon the assumption of an interference-free environment.”

The creation of new algorithms, though, could be the key to limiting interference from competing users.

“I’m proposing a framework that allows radar to operate within a certain band, monitor the band and separate out the desired signals from the ones I don’t care about,” McCormick said.

photo by: University of Kansas

Patrick McCormick

The research comes at a time when the U.S. government is getting more serious about holding auctions for private companies to purchase space on parts of the spectrum that previously were off limits to the private sector.

In November, the Biden Administration announced a new “National Spectrum Strategy” that calls for more auctions of spectrum space, as long as technology develops that addresses issues like unintended interference of signals.

The national strategy predicts that uses for available spectrum space could include 6G broadband networks that could function at higher speeds than today’s versions, large satellite constellations that would make broadband connections in remote places more feasible, autonomous vehicles, and support for a much greater number of private space launches, among other uses.

But the stakes of getting the technology right are also high, the strategy notes. The spectrum already is playing key roles for everything from national security to climate monitoring. The military largely has become accustomed to having large amounts of interference-free spectrum available to it.

The new national strategy recognizes that issues of interference could become serious as more users are allowed on the spectrum. That’s one of the reasons the new strategy is calling for a “moonshot effort” in the next 12 to 18 months to greatly enhance the amount of research that is undertaken about the electromagnetic spectrum. The strategy calls for “collaboration with industry, to advance research, create investment incentives, and set forth measurable goals for advancing the state of technology for spectrum access, with an emphasis on dynamic forms of spectrum sharing for all users.”

That could put McCormick’s research and expertise in high demand. McCormick said he thinks his work on creating new algorithms for spectrum use could lead to other breakthroughs as the country gets more serious about utilizing the spectrum.

“I hope the results from this project will be a seed for a research portfolio that continues to expand in the future,” McCormick said in a KU press release.

— The KU News Service contributed to this report.