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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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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GATE-2012 ECE Q39 (communication)

Question 39 on communication from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q39. The signal  as shown is applied both to  a phase modulator (with  as the phase constant) and a frequency modulator (with as the frequency constant) having the same carrier frequency.  The ratio  for the same maximum phase deviation is,…

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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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