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First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Prof. Jennifer E. Michaels. I am most appreciative of your guidance over the last four years, from the basics of elastic waves to both short- and long-term career advice. I have grown a tremendous amount, both profes-sionally and personally, and am deeply grateful for your mentorship, patience, and support. I would also like to thank my Ph.D. committee for their valuable insight and sugges-

in partial ful2llment of the requirements for the degree of

(MRR) is a passive VHF radar network located in the Pacific Northwest. The radar leverages commercial FM radio broadcasts (∼100 MHz) for illumination and low-cost commercial software radio components to sample the RF signal. Common targets include Bragg scatter off E-region turbulence, meteor wakes

-tuned tasks for the circuit level. Sampling theory, the gate to the digital world, is the key enabling this revolution, encompassing all aspects related to the conversion of continuous-time signals to discrete streams of numbers. The famous Shannon-Nyquist theorem has become a landmark: a mathematical

We are surrounded by electronic devices that take advantage of wireless technologies, from our computer mice, which require little amounts of information, to our cellphones, which demand increasingly higher data rates. Until today, the coexistence of such a variety of services has been guaranteed by a fixed assignment of spectrum resources by regulatory agencies. This has resulted into a blind alley, as current wireless spectrum has become an expensive and a scarce resource. However, recent measurements in dense areas paint a very different picture: there is an actual underutilization of the spectrum by legacy sys-tems. Cognitive radio exhibits a tremendous promise for increasing the spectral efficiency for future wireless systems. Ideally, new secondary users would have a perfect panorama of the spectrum usage, and would opportunistically communicate over the available re-sources without degrading the primary systems. Yet in practice, monitoring the spectrum resources, detecting available resources for opportunistic communication, and transmit-ting over the resources are hard tasks. This thesis addresses the tasks of monitoring, de-

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