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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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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Quiz on IEEE 802.11a specifications

The IEEE 802.11a specifications are used by many to understand a wireless communication link built using OFDM. In this post, I have put together a set of 10 multiple choice questions based on 802.11a specifications. The questions are on the building blocks in 802.11a specifications, preamble structure and so on. Upon completion of the quiz,…

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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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Stochastic Gradient Descent

For curve fitting using linear regression, there exists a minor variant of Batch Gradient Descent algorithm, called Stochastic Gradient Descent. In the Batch Gradient Descent, the parameter vector  is updated as, . (loop over all elements of training set in one iteration) For Stochastic Gradient Descent, the vector gets updated as, at each iteration the…

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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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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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Selection Diversity

This is the first 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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