Editor's comments

We have a special section consisting of papers invited from three of the awardees from the URSI AP-RASC 2016 Student Paper Competition. There is a separate Foreword describing the papers, so I won't go into details. However, these three papers are of excellent quality and deal with very interesting topics: a new optimization method for ray-tracing in the ionosphere, improvements in cross-borehole pulse radar, and a method to enhance RF power output using optical pulse compression in photonicbased RF generation. With these as examples of what our students are doing, URSI's future looks bright!