
Joon Wayn Cheong is currently a Lecturer / Senior Research Associate at the School of Electrical Engineering, University of New South Wales (UNSW). He is also the Deputy Director of Australian Center for Space Engineering Research (ACSER). He received his PhD in 2012) and BE (2008) from UNSW Sydney. He is currently involved in Univ. Sydney and UNSW Sydney's CUAVA satellite mission and was the Technical Lead for UNSW’s Cubesat mission (UNSW-EC0) and built the first two Australian Cubesats to become operational in space. His research combines GNSS, phased array and signal processing theories with application towards GNSS interference mitigation, GNSS weak signal acquisition, reflectometry-based remote sensing, embedded systems and vehicular networked-navigation.
GNSS Reflectometry
He is currently involved in Univ. Sydney and UNSW Sydney's CUAVA satellite mission. I am also currently investigating remote sensing applications using GNSS Reflectometry. using datasets from the satellite missions of NASA CYGNSS and UK's TechDemoSat-1 TDS-1.
UNSW-EC0 Satellite Mission
Between 2014 - 2018, I led the technical aspects of UNSW’s first Australian university-built nanosatellite (Cubesat) operational in space, named UNSW-EC0. Furthermore, I have also led University of Sydney through its satellite project, named INPSIRE-2, which is a collaborative effort between UNSW and University of Sydney and ANU. It too became operational in space. Inserted into orbit on May 2017, these are the first Australian-built satellites in space in 15 years, and both UNSW-EC0 and INSPIRE-2 are the first pair of Australian-built Cubesats to function in space. Both satellites carry experiments and payloads essential to demonstrate Australia’s technical capabilities in space, such as a GPS navigation system that was fully developed in UNSW.
GNSS Interference Localisation
From 2015-present, I have been involved with GPSat Systems Pty Ltd (an Australian company in VIC) to investigate the enhancement of its GNSS interference detection and localization system. GNSS users are prone to interference produced by devices in the user’s surrounding area. These interference sources can be identified and localised by a network of dedicated sensors with phased array antennas. There are two rudimentary methods that can be used to detect and localise these interference sources: Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA). I was involved as a postdoctoral researcher to investigate sophisticated signal processing techniques that can be used to combine AoA and TDoA methods to enhance the accuracy and sensitivity of the GNSS interference localisation sensor network.
Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS)
During 2014-2015, I investigated the enhancement of GNSS positioning capability by exploiting inter-vehicular communication in collaboration with Thales Alenia Space (TAS), France, another demonstration of academia-industry collaboration. This is a project investigates the application of cooperative and network methods for vehicular navigation and anti-collision when using GNSS and inter-vehicular (V2V) radio-ranging systems. Both technologies suffer from multipath and Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) distortions in urban environments. The project is a departure from existing work in that it proposes a system that is able to reject anomalous GNSS and V2V measurements and retain the Line-of-Sight measurements to provide more accurate positioning under such challenging radio environment.
Embedded GNSS Navigation Receiver
Between 2012-2014 I was involved in developing a prototype navigation receiver. This custom FPGA-based space-qualified prototype Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver, dubbed the Garada receiver, will be able to cater for the precise positioning and timing needs of the proposed formation-flying Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites that are also part of the ACSER umbrella. My core responsibility was to develop the acquisition, tracking and decoding C/C++ algorithms for the European SatNav GNSS E1 signal as an enhancement to ACSER’s pre-existing GPS-only Garada FPGA receiver. This project was the result of an industrial partnership with General Dynamics NZ, an SME in New Zealand.
Elec Eng. 4th Year UG Thesis Topics (updated 16th June 2020)
- Signal Processing for Sea State estimation using GNSS Reflectometry
- Altimetry using GNSS Reflectometry
- Open Source Space Operations
- Using Rust for GPU-accelerated GNSS signal processing
- Machine Learning Assisted Satellite Based Positioning
- Passive Geolocalisation of Wideband GNSS Jammer
- Software Defined Radio for Cubesat Ground Stations
- Multi-frequency SDR for Australian SBAS
- Software Verification Environment for Cubesats
- Near Real-time Raspberry Pi Space-based GPS Receiver
- Deep Learning Methods for Indoor Localisation
- Adding Reliability to the Cubesat Standard
- Crowdsourced GPS/GNSS Spoofer Detection