Case Study: YarCom achieves rapid DoD radio interference detection and automated monitoring with MathWorks MATLAB

YarCom Improves Radio Reception for the Department of Defense

YarCom, an RF engineering services firm supporting the Department of Defense, faced prolonged, costly field campaigns to find and eliminate noise and interference that degraded military radio links. Their manual method required 5–8 engineers on-site for two weeks with 20 cases of gear, so they sought a measurement, instrument-control and computational environment—MATLAB from MathWorks—to remotely monitor victim receivers, control multi-vendor RF instruments, synchronize measurements with GPS, and present results for faster decision making.

Using MathWorks’ MATLAB and toolboxes (Instrument Control, Data Acquisition, Communications, Signal Processing, Statistics and Machine Learning, and Mapping), YarCom automated data acquisition, instrument control (including custom scripts for Agilent ESA‑E analyzers to capture >25 1,024‑point observations/sec), analysis, and geolocation, and created the “Lott Plot” to quantify Probability of Mission Success. The MathWorks-based solution reduced automation time from years to months, cut field teams to a few people and equipment to a single instrument plus a notebook or 3–5 cases as needed, enabled continuous unattended data collection, and saved thousands of dollars per deployment.

YarCom

Gus Lott

Principal Engineer