GATE-2012 ECE Q16 (electromagnetics)

Question 16 on electromagnetics from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q16. A coaxial cable with an inner diameter of 1mm and outer diameter of 2.4mm is filled with a dielectric of relative permittivity 10.89. Given ,  the characteristic impedance of the cable is (A)  (B)  (C)  (D)  Solution To…

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Selection Diversity

This is the first 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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Blog on DSP

I happened to visit ‘The Digital Signal Processing Blog’, maintained by Mr. Andres Kwasinski, Ph. D. In the blog one can find details about the upcoming IEEE conferences pertaining to communication and multimedia processing. Further, in some of the posts, author shares his thoughts on topics like fixed point arithmetic (here) and wavelets (here) etc….

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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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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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Oscillator phase noise

Oscillators are used in typical radio circuits to drive the mixer used for the up-conversion or down-conversion of the passband transmission. Ideally, the spectrum of the oscillator is expected to have an impulse at the frequency of oscillation with no frequency components else where. However the spectrum of practical oscillators do have spectrum skirts around…

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