Linear to log conversion

In signal processing blocks like power estimation used in digital communication, it may be required to represent the estimate in log scale. This post explains a simple linear to log conversion scheme proposed in the DSP Guru column on DSP Trick: Quick-and-Dirty Logarithms. The scheme makes implementation of a linear to log conversion simple and…

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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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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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Matlab or C for Viterbi Decoder?

Are you bothered by speed of the speed of the simulations which you develop in Matlab/Octave? I was not bothered much, till I ran into the Viterbi decoder. If you recall, the Matlab/Octave simulation script for BER computation with hard soft decision Viterbi algorithm provided in post Viterbi with finite survivor state memory took around…

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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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Closed form solution for linear regression

In the previous post on Batch Gradient Descent and Stochastic Gradient Descent, we looked at two iterative methods for finding the parameter vector  which minimizes the square of the error between the predicted value  and the actual output  for all  values in the training set. A closed form solution for finding the parameter vector  is possible, and in this post…

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GATE-2012 ECE Q2 (communication)

Question 52 on communication from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q2. The power spectral density of a real process for positive frequencies is shown below. The values of  and , respectively are (A)  (B)  (C)  (D)  Solution For a wide sense stationary function, the auto-correlation with delay  is defined as,…

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