GATE-2012 ECE Q3 (communication)

Question 3 on Communication from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q3. In a baseband communications link, frequencies upto 3500Hz are used for signalling. Using a raised cosine pulse with 75% excess bandwidth and for no inter-symbol interference, the maximum possible signaling rate in symbols per second is, (A)…

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Alamouti STBC

In the recent past, we have discussed three receive diversity schemes – Selection combining, Equal Gain Combining and Maximal Ratio Combining. All the three approaches used the antenna array at the receiver to improve the demodulation performance, albeit with different levels of complexity. Time to move on to a transmit diversity scheme where the information…

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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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Chi Square Random Variable

While trying to derive the theoretical bit error rate (BER) for BPSK modulation in a Rayleigh fading channel, I realized that I need to discuss chi square random variable prior. What is chi-square random variable? Let there be independent and identically distributed Gaussian random variables with mean and variance and we form a new random…

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GATE-2012 ECE Q7 (digital)

Question 7 on digital from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q7. The output Y of a 2-bit comparator is logic 1 whenever the 2 bit input A is greater than 2 bit input B. The number of combinations for which output is logic 1 is (A) 4 (B)…

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Transmit beamforming

In this post lets discuss a closed-loop transmit diversity scheme, where the transmitter has the knowledge of the channel. As there is a feedback path required from the receiver, to communicate the channel seen by the receiver to the transmitter, the scheme is called closed-loop transmit diversity scheme. Recall that the transmit diversity using Space…

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