Joe spectrum | Ep 23

Voices

• Joseph Evans, program manager, Strategic Technology Office
• Host: Ivan Amato, Public Affairs

Converting radar systems into communications channels and leveraging satellite imagery

Joseph Evans, a program manager since 2015 in the agency's Strategic Technology Office (STO), shares with listeners how his embrace of data, communications technologies, and the electromagnetic spectrum—the invisible place where radio, radar, and other radio frequency (RF) signals live and propagate—has led to the portfolio of programs that he now oversees. 

This portfolio includes a program that essentially renders visible the frenetic RF activity that is going on in the space we occupy. Another program includes the challenge of converting radar systems into communications channels. In yet another, Joe is striving to find better ways of leveraging the ever-growing reservoir of commercial and open-source satellite imagery to improve warfighters’ abilities to detect, monitor, and track what is going on, that is, to improve their situational awareness. 

Joe also flies planes, skippers boats, skies, runs, and sometimes straps on a guitar to send acoustic waves into the same space hosting all of those electromagnetic waves that he cares so much about.