Professor Inder J. Gupta Receives ION’s Prestigious Weems Award

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Faculty Emeritus Professor Inder "Jiti" Gupta receives the prestigious Weems award from the Institute of Navigation given in the memory of Captain Philip Van Horn Weems (1889 – 1979). Captain Weems was the United States Navy Officer, inventor of naviational instruments and methods, and the author of navigational textbooks. Professor Gupta received this recognition for his continuing contributions to the art and science of navigation. He is a world renowned engineer on anti-jam antennas and signal processing techniques for interference suppression in GNSS receivers. He has conducted pioneering theoretical and experimental work that enabled the implementation of these techniques in real world systems. 

Professor Gupta joined the ElectroScience Laboratory in 1978 as a graduate student. He received his Ph.D. in 1982 and since then he has been with ESL at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as a researcher and then a faculty member.

In the nineties, at the request of GPS Joint Program Office (GPS Directorate now), he carried out an analysis of the various interference suppression techniques in GPS receivers. He demonstrated that for the expected jamming threats, only joint Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) or joint Space-Frequency Adaptive Processing (SFAP) can provide the desired protection to a GPS receiver. This work was the foundation of Advanced Digital Antenna Production (ADAP) program, under which US Navy upgraded its AJ (Anti-Jam) antennas for various platforms. 

In early 2000s, Dr. Gupta developed the first analytical model to predict the performance of SFAP-based anti-jam antennas. He used this model to demonstrate that SFAP could provide as good interference suppression as STAP. Prof. Gupta has also contributed to reducing the size of anti-jam antennas for GNSS receivers. One of his designs has six elements and fits into the footprint allocated for regular GNSS antennas. More importantly, these antennas are designed for wideband operation (1150 MHz to 1600 MHz) and thus can be used to receive signals from all GNSS satellites. 

Next, Dr. Gupta co-developed the first STAP algorithm that simultaneously provides good AJ properties and reduces antenna-induced biases in GNSS measurements. For the existing AJ antennas, he found efficient approaches for on-the-fly-estimation of antenna-induced biases that have been verified experimentally.

More recently, Dr. Gupta was instrumental in the success of Small Antenna System (SAS) program managed by SPAWAR, where he identified the interference suppression deficiencies of the available antenna electronics for GPS receivers mounted on rotorcrafts, and developed innovative approaches to model rotorcraft modulation in hardware-in-the-loop testing.

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