The Montgomery College Parabolic Antenna Project

摘要

The first engineering course at Montgomery College is ES100:Introduction to Engineering Design. This is a laboratory coursewhere the students have a required design and construction project. Thecurrent projects are mechanical engineering in nature and require littleor no calculations in their design. In the Spring 2005 semester, wepiloted a new electrical engineering project that required severalcalculations in the design. The project was to design and construct a 2.4GHz parabolic antenna. The students were divided into design teamsand each team was provided with a patch antenna for the feed, a downconverter,and a hand held communications receiver. The students wererequired to design and construct a parabolic reflector for the parabolicantenna. The students needed to calculate the correct shape anddimensions in their design. In this paper, we will describe theexperience of this pilot project and what we learned.