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…

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BER with Matched Filtering

In the post on transmit pulse shaping filter, we had discussed pulse shaping using rectangular and sinc. In this post we will discuss about optimal receiver structure when pulse shaping is used at the transmitter. The receiver structure is also called as matched filter. For the discussion, we will assume rectangular pulse shaping, the channel…

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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…

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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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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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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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