Scaling factor in QAM

When QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) is used, typically one may find a scaling factor associated with the constellation mapping operation. It may be reasonably obvious that this scaling factor is for normalizing the average energy to one. This post attempts to compute the average energy of the 16-QAM, 64-QAM and M-QAM constellation (where is a…

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BPSK BER with OFDM modulation

Oflate, I am getting frequent requests for bit error rate simulations using OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) modulation. In this post, we will discuss a simple OFDM transmitter and receiver, find the relation between Eb/No (Bit to Noise ratio) and Es/No (Signal to Noise ratio) and compute the bit error rate with BPSK.

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Alamouti STBC

In the recent past, we have discussed three receive diversity schemes – Selection combining, Equal Gain Combining and Maximal Ratio Combining. All the three approaches used the antenna array at the receiver to improve the demodulation performance, albeit with different levels of complexity. Time to move on to a transmit diversity scheme where the information…

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Support Vibha’s Dream Mile event

My friend Mr. Balaji volunteers for Vibha, a non-profit  organization whose mission is to ensure that every underprivileged child attains his or her right to education, health and opportunity. Vibha, which was founded in 1991 has a volunteer network of 825 members spread across Atlanta, Austin, Bay Area, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Jacksonville, Los Angeles,…

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GATE-2012 ECE Q3 (communication)

Question 3 on Communication from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q3. In a baseband communications link, frequencies upto 3500Hz are used for signalling. Using a raised cosine pulse with 75% excess bandwidth and for no inter-symbol interference, the maximum possible signaling rate in symbols per second is, (A)…

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