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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GATE-2012 ECE Q16 (electromagnetics)

Question 16 on electromagnetics from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q16. A coaxial cable with an inner diameter of 1mm and outer diameter of 2.4mm is filled with a dielectric of relative permittivity 10.89. Given ,  the characteristic impedance of the cable is (A)  (B)  (C)  (D)  Solution To…

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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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Happy Birthday – dspLog

An important milestone for the dspLog happened on Oct 21st 2008. On this day last year, the blog migrated from the Blogger platform to the independently hosted platform at www.dsplog.com ! Belated birthday wishes for the blog!!! 🙂 Looking back, the first year was satisfying – both in terms of contents and traffic. We started…

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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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