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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Deriving PDF of Rayleigh random variable

In the post on Rayleigh channel model, we stated that a circularly symmetric random variable is of the form , where real and imaginary parts are zero mean independent and identically distributed (iid) Gaussian random variables. The magnitude which has the probability density, is called a Rayleigh random variable. Further, the phase is uniformly distributed from…

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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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OCW: Communication System Design

While browsing through the web for materials on the wireless communication and implementation, found this rich set of articles as part of MIT OPEN COURSEWARE program. The course is from Vladimir Stojanovic, course materials for 6.973 Communication System Design, Spring 2006. MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Comparing BPSK, QPSK, 4PAM, 16QAM, 16PSK, 64QAM and 32PSK

I have written another article in DSPDesginLine.com. This article can be treated as the third post in the series aimed at understanding Shannon’s capacity equation. For the first two posts in the series are: 1. Understanding Shannon’s capacity equation 2. Bounds on Communication based on Shannon’s capacity The article summarizes the symbol error rate derivations…

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GATE-2012 ECE Q2 (communication)

Question 52 on communication from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q2. The power spectral density of a real process for positive frequencies is shown below. The values of  and , respectively are (A)  (B)  (C)  (D)  Solution For a wide sense stationary function, the auto-correlation with delay  is defined as,…

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GATE-2012 ECE Q38 (communication)

Question 38 on Communication from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q38. A binary symmetric channel (BSC) has a transition probability of 1/8. If the binary transmit symbol X is such that P(X=0)=9/10, then the probability of error for an optimum receiver will be (A) 7/80 (B) 63/80 (C)…

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