Project Number: 3607-21620-008-01
Project Type: Specific Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: Jun 08, 2006
End Date: May 31, 2009

Objective:
To develop a microwave inset tracking system (or harmonic radar tracking system) containing a small, light-weight radio frequency tags and user-friendly transmitter and receiver for the emerald ash borer and black vine weevil insects, to clarify their dispersal and behavioral patterns that are incompletely understood and for which few or even conflicting data are available.

Approach:
Tracking a target using radio frequencies (RF) is a common radar problem that is characterized by radar cross section area of the RF tag, power delivered to system antenna and operation wavelength. RF tags have been used for RF ID by transmitting back encoded information to the reader. This allows for non-contact detection and identification of the tagged object or person. For the insect tracking application that requires a small tag structure, the structure scattering will be mainly from the body of the insect, which is much smaller than that from the tag. Therefore, the antenna-mode scattering becomes the dominant scattering mechanism. However, existing RF ID system is not suitable for the purpose of tracking small insects for two reasons. First, the size and weight of the current RF tags are too much for the small insect to handle. This is mainly limited by the low operation frequencies and the coding device. Second, most RF ID systems have only short detection range. Common RF tag designs separate transmitting and receiving frequencies for better isolation between the transmitter and receiver, thus enhancing the sensitivity. Some conversion loss at the tag due to frequency conversion will occur. Therefore, approaches to develop a harmonic radar tracking system for small insects will be: (1) Designing and optimizing a RF tag that receive 10.515 GHz and reradiate 10.515 GHz and 21.03 GHz (receiver frequency). This effort will be carried out via numerical model initially followed by fabrication and measurement for validation. The measurements will be carried out initially using RF frequency synthesizer and spectrum analyzer while the transceiver is being developed. (2) Designing a transceiver that transmits 10.515 GHz microwave signal with a power more than 1W, and receives 21.03 GHz signal with at least 90 dB dynamic range.