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 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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Understanding an OFDM transmission

Let us try to understand simulation of a typical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transmission defined per IEEE 802.11a specification. Orthogonal pulses In a previous post (here ), we have understood that the minimum frequency separation for two sinusoidals with arbitrary phases to be orthogonal is , where is the symbol period. In Orthogonal Frequency…

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Convolutional code

Coding is a technique where redundancy is added to original bit sequence to increase the reliability of the communication. In this article, lets discuss a simple binary convolutional coding scheme at the transmitter and the associated Viterbi (maximum likelihood) decoding scheme at the receiver. Update: For some reason, the blog is unable to display the…

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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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Six equalizers for V-BLAST

In the past, we had discussed several posts on two transmit two receive MIMO communication, where the transmission was based on V-BLAST. The details about V-BLAST can be read from the landmark paper V-BLAST: An architeture for realizing very high data rates over the rich scattering wireless channel – P. W. Wolniansky, G. J. Foschini,…

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GATE-2012 ECE Q12 (math)

Question 12 on math from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q12. With initial condition  the solution of the differential equation,  is (A) (B) (C) (D) Solution From the product rule used to find the derivative of product of two or more functions, Applying this to the above equation, we…

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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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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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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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