This project will create innovative laboratory experiments utilizing the theme of amateur radio and satellite signal reception and processing to help improve undergraduate software engineering instruction.The projects will require the students to engineer semi-formal requirement specifications, architectural and detailed designs for systems that predict amateur satellite locations, control orientation of signal antennas from a microcomputer, receive, store and decode amateur satellite telemetry data, and collect and process radio packets of earth snapshots from amateur satellites, using well- accepted principles and techniques of structured analysis/design and object-oriented analysis/design.The projects will improve undergraduate software engineering instruction in that they are not the usual business applications commonly found in standard textbooks, they illustrate the rationales behind software engineering principles and techniques presented in lectures, they will educate the students in the process of gaining domain knowledge in a field where they were not formally trained and they provide an enjoyable and challenging environment.
