The IEEE 2003 Radar Conference (RadarCon03) was held at the Huntsville Marriott during May 5 - 8. This conference is held every year in the United States and coincides with the International Radar Conference held in the US every five years. This year, about 220 people attended, including 14 students who were wholly or partially supported by the conference. Twenty countries were represented.

The format for this conference followed that of previous meetings in this series, with radar-related tutorials given on Monday evening and all day Thursday and technical sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday. After the tutorials on Monday evening, a reception was held at the US Space and Rocket Center. The technical sessions began on Tuesday morning with a keynote address by Mr. Art Stephenson, Director of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, who spoke on the use of radar in NASA's exploration of space and in remote sensing of the earth. This talk was in keeping with the theme of the conference "Radar - Exploring the Universe". The conference banquet was held on Tuesday evening, and the banquet speaker was Prof. Konrad Dannenberg, a member of the von Braun team, who spoke on "The Dawn of the Space Age", an account of the development of the German A-4 Rocket during World War II. The A-4, which later became the V-2, was the first manmade object to reach space.

An increasingly important part of the series of radar conferences is the participation of exhibitors. A total of 19 exhibitors showed their products and technologies in this year's conference, which is more than any previous conference in this series. An exhibitor's reception was held on Wednesday evening and door prizes were given to three persons who visited all of the exhibit booths.

The most important part of any conference is the technical sessions and their content. During RadarCon03, the topics of technical sessions were Radar Systems, Phenomenology, Space-Time Adaptive Processing, Antennas and Components, Signal and Data Processing, Emerging Technologies, and Bistatic Systems. Thirty-Five oral papers and about 40 poster papers were presented in these topic areas. Included in the poster papers were two student papers that were eligible for the best student paper prize. This prize went to Mr. Lav Varshney, an undergraduate student at Cornell University. Lav presented his paper orally at lunch on Wednesday to the entire conference.

The conference organizers are grateful to the Huntsville Section, IEEE Region 3, the Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society of the IEEE and the attendees for making the conference a technical and financial success. Special thanks are due Dynetics, Inc. and the Raytheon Company for generous cash grants that were instrumental in making the conference a success.