Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC)

This is the third 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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GATE-2012 ECE Q47 (math)

Question 47 on math from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q47. Given that and , the value of is (A)  (B)  (C)  (D)  Solution To answer this question, we need to refer to Cayley Hamilton Theorem. This is discussed briefly in Pages 310-311 of Introduction to Linear Algebra, Glibert Strang (buy…

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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…

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MIMO with ML equalization

We have discussed quite a few receiver structures for a 2×2 MIMO channel namely, (a) Zero Forcing (ZF) equalization (b) Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) equalization (c) Zero Forcing equalization with Successive Interference Cancellation (ZF-SIC) (d) ZF-SIC with optimal ordering and (e) MIMO with MMSE SIC and optimal ordering From the above receiver structures, we…

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BPSK BER with OFDM modulation

Oflate, I am getting frequent requests for bit error rate simulations using OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) modulation. In this post, we will discuss a simple OFDM transmitter and receiver, find the relation between Eb/No (Bit to Noise ratio) and Es/No (Signal to Noise ratio) and compute the bit error rate with BPSK.

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GATE-2012 ECE Q24 (math)

Question 24 on math from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q24. Two independent random variables X and Y are uniformly distributed in the interval [-1, 1]. The probability that max[X,Y] is less than 1/2 is (A) 3/4 (B) 9/16 (C) 1/4 (D) 2/3

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