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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Oscillator phase noise

Oscillators are used in typical radio circuits to drive the mixer used for the up-conversion or down-conversion of the passband transmission. Ideally, the spectrum of the oscillator is expected to have an impulse at the frequency of oscillation with no frequency components else where. However the spectrum of practical oscillators do have spectrum skirts around…

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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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MIMO with MMSE SIC and optimal ordering

This post attempts to build further on the MIMO equalization schemes which we have discussed – (a) Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) equalization, (b) Zero Forcing equalization with Successive Interference Cancellation (ZF-SIC) and (c) ZF-SIC with optimal ordering. We have learned that successive interference cancellation with optimal ordering improves the performance with Zero Forcing equalization….

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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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GATE-2012 ECE Q15 (communication)

Question 15 on communication from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q15. A source alphabet consists of N symbols with the probability of the first two symbols being the same. A source encoder increases the probability of the first symbol by a small amount  and decreases that of the…

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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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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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