Steve F. Russell (M'76, SM'94) was born in Lewiston, Idaho. He received a B.S. degree (1966) from Montana State University at Bozeman. His M.S. (1973) and Ph.D. (1978) in Electrical Engineering were received from Iowa State University in Ames.
From 1966 to 1970, he was in the Telecommunications Division at Collins Radio Company where he did RF circuit design for low-noise receiver frequency translators used in VHF and UHF applications such as avionics and the TACSATCOM program.
From 1970 to 1972, he taught circuits and communications in the electronics Technology Department at Iowa State. He also did thesis research in noise and sensitivity-measurement theory for receiving systems and circuits.
From 1973 to 1975, he was a self-employed consulting engineer and a research fellow working on his dissertation in spectral analysis methods for noisy sampled-data systems.
In 1976, he joined the Avionics Division of Rockwell-Collins where he played a key roll in the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System program. He developed the statistical theory and performance analysis of the acquisition algorithms for the high-antijam receiver design in the Phase-I GPS, the General Development Model (GDM). He also collaborated on the analysis and simulation of the tracking statistics. He was project engineer for receiver integration testing on the GDM. He led the Phase-IIA manpack red team and had critical responsibility for the product design. His expertise in antijam receiving system design was recognized in a monograph prepared for use by system designers. He was the first project manager of the Surface Vehicle Navigation System program with General Motors which was the first civil application of GPS at Rockwell.
From 1980 to 1984, he was the first principal engineer for King Radio Corporation where his assignments were advanced navigation and communication system design, signal processing design and analysis, high-precision TCXO design and manufacturing. At King Radio, he developed the software environment and procedures for microprocessor support, software configuration management, software quality assurance, and software certification.
He joined the Faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering at Iowa State as an Associate Professor in 1984. He teaches courses in Communication System Theory, Spread Spectrum Systems, Digital Signal Processing, Statistical Communications, and Spectral Analysis. His research has been in the areas of Spread-Spectrum Ultrasonic Testing, Spread Spectrum Acoustic Echo Cancellation, complex FIR digital filter design, frequency-hop communications intercept, HF networking, and radiograph image processing.
Dr. Russell is a member of the AES and COM societies of IEEE. He is a past student branch
advisor for the Central Iowa Section of IEEE. He is also a member of Sigma Xi and
is a registered professional engineer in the State of Iowa.