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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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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Comparing BPSK, QPSK, 4PAM, 16QAM, 16PSK, 64QAM and 32PSK

I have written another article in DSPDesginLine.com. This article can be treated as the third post in the series aimed at understanding Shannon’s capacity equation. For the first two posts in the series are: 1. Understanding Shannon’s capacity equation 2. Bounds on Communication based on Shannon’s capacity The article summarizes the symbol error rate derivations…

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GATE-2012 ECE Q36 (math)

Question 36 on math from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q36. A fair coin is tossed till a head appears for the first time. The probability that the number of required tosses is odd, is (A) 1/3 (B) 1/2 (C) 2/3 (D) 3/4 Solution Let us start by…

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