GATE-2012 ECE Q11 (signals)
Question 11 on signals from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q11. The unilateral Laplace transform of is . The unilateral Laplace transform ofis (A) (B) (C) (D) Solution From the definition of Laplace transform for a function defined for all real numbers is, , where with real numbers and . To find the Laplace…
GATE-2012 ECE Q13 (circuits)
Question 13 on analog electronics from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q13. The diodes and the capacitors in the circuit shown are ideal. The voltage across the diode is (A) (B) (C) (D) Solution The first half of the circuit is a negative clamper circuit and the second half…
Minimum frequency spacing for having orthogonal sinusoidals
In this post, the objective is to figure out the minimum separation between two sinusoidals having frequencies , of duration each to be orthogonal. Let the phase difference between the sinusoidals is where can take any value from to (Refer Example 4.3 [DIG-COMM-SKLAR]). For the two sinuosidals to be orthogonal,
GATE-2012 ECE Q46 (math)
Question 46 on math from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q46. The maximum value of in the interval [1, 6] is (A) 21 (B) 25 (C) 41 (D) 46 Solution Let us start by finding the critical points of the function . The first derivative is, . Solving by…
Solved objective questions (GATE)
Using the services of a new author ‘RV’, we are starting a new series of articles in the blog. Typically in India, many of the competitive examinations pertaining to Engineering (GATE, IES) and rectuitment by private and public sector companies (ISRO, BSNL, BEL, BHEL) uses examination with objective questions for the first level screening. We…
Raised cosine filter for transmit pulse shaping
In the previous post on transmit filtering using Nyquist pulse, we had briefly learned that the information symbol with a symbol period can be transmitted without inter symbol interference (ISI) by using Nyquist pulse, . The resultant waveform is ideally bandlimited to frequencies from Hz to Hz. However, in typical transmission schemes, we do not…
Migrated to Amazon EC2 instance (from shared hosting)
Being not too happy with the speed of the shared hosting, decided to move the blog to an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance. Given this is a baby step, picked up a micro instance running an Ubuntu server and installed Apache web server, MySQL, PHP . After doing a bit of tweaking with this new…
Negative Frequency
Last week, I received an email from Mr. Kishore. He was wondering about the physical significance of negative frequency. Does negative frequency really exist? Though I have seen conflicting views on the net (thread in complextoreal.com, thread in comp.dsp), my perspective is that negative frequency exist. The concept of negative frequency helps me a lot…
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…
GATE-2012 ECE Q36 (math)
Question 36 on math from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q36. A fair coin is tossed till a head appears for the first time. The probability that the number of required tosses is odd, is (A) 1/3 (B) 1/2 (C) 2/3 (D) 3/4 Solution Let us start by…
Alamouti STBC with 2 receive antenna
In the past, we had discussed two transmit, one receive antenna Alamouti Space Time Block Coding (STBC) scheme. In this post, lets us discuss the impact of having two antennas at the receiver. For the discussion, we will assume that the channel is a flat fading Rayleigh multipath channel and the modulation is BPSK.
Noise Figure of resistor network
The post on thermal noise described the noise produced by resistor ohms over bandwidth at temperature Kelvin. In this post, let us define the noise voltage at the input and output of a resistor network and further use it to define the Noise Figure of such a network.
Symbol Error Rate (SER) for 16-QAM
Given that we have went over the symbol error probability for 4-PAM and symbol error rate for 4-QAM , let us extend the understanding to find the symbol error probability for 16-QAM (16 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation). Consider a typical 16-QAM modulation scheme where the alphabets (Refer example 5-37 in [DIG-COMM-BARRY-LEE-MESSERSCHMITT]). are used.