GATE-2012 ECE Q52 (electromagnetics)

Question 52 on electromagnetics from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. An infinitely long uniform solid wire of radius  carries a uniform dc current of density . Q52. The magnetic field at a distance  from the center of the wire is proportional to (A)  for and for (B)  for  and  for  (C)  for  and  for  (D)  for  and  for  Solution…

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Stochastic Gradient Descent

For curve fitting using linear regression, there exists a minor variant of Batch Gradient Descent algorithm, called Stochastic Gradient Descent. In the Batch Gradient Descent, the parameter vector  is updated as, . (loop over all elements of training set in one iteration) For Stochastic Gradient Descent, the vector gets updated as, at each iteration the…

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MIMO with MMSE equalizer

In a previous post, we had discussed a 2×2 MIMO transmission using BPSK modulation in Rayleigh channel with a Zero Forcing equalizer. The simulated results with the 2×2 MIMO system  with zero forcing equalizer showed matching results as obtained in for a 1×1 system for BPSK modulation in Rayleigh channel. In this post, we will…

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Equal Gain Combining (EGC)

This is the second post in the series discussing receiver diversity in a wireless link. Receiver diversity is a form of space diversity, where there are multiple antennas at the receiver. The presence of receiver diversity poses an interesting problem – how do we use ‘effectively‘ the information from all the antennas to demodulate the…

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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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Understanding an OFDM transmission

Let us try to understand simulation of a typical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transmission defined per IEEE 802.11a specification. Orthogonal pulses In a previous post (here ), we have understood that the minimum frequency separation for two sinusoidals with arbitrary phases to be orthogonal is , where is the symbol period. In Orthogonal Frequency…

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Linear to log conversion

In signal processing blocks like power estimation used in digital communication, it may be required to represent the estimate in log scale. This post explains a simple linear to log conversion scheme proposed in the DSP Guru column on DSP Trick: Quick-and-Dirty Logarithms. The scheme makes implementation of a linear to log conversion simple and…

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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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Viterbi decoder

Coding is a technique where redundancy is added to original bit sequence to increase the reliability of the communication. Lets discuss a simple binary convolutional coding scheme at the transmitter and the associated Viterbi (maximum likelihood) decoding scheme at the receiver. Update: For some reason, the blog is unable to display the article which discuss…

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