Happy New Year 2010

Wishing all the readers of dsplog.com a great year 2010 ! Its been a mixed year for dsplog. Some key milestones a) Crossing 1000 subscribers with 1100+ comments in March 2009 b) Crossing 100 posts with 2200 subscribers and 2600+ comments in October 2009 c) As I write this, we have 102 posts with 2603…

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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…

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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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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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GATE-2012 ECE Q52 (electromagnetics)

Question 52 on electromagnetics from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. An infinitely long uniform solid wire of radius  carries a uniform dc current of density . Q52. The magnetic field at a distance  from the center of the wire is proportional to (A)  for and for (B)  for  and  for  (C)  for  and  for  (D)  for  and  for  Solution…

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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…

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