Bit Error Rate (BER) for frequency shift keying with coherent demodulation

Following the request by Siti Naimah, this post discuss the bit error probability for coherent demodulation of binary Frequency Shift Keying (BFSK) along with a small Matlab code snippet. Using the definition provided in Sec 4.4.4 of [DIG-COMM-SKLAR]), in binary Frequency shift keying (BFSK), the bits 0’s and 1’s are represented by signals and having…

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GATE-2012 ECE Q12 (math)

Question 12 on math from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q12. With initial condition  the solution of the differential equation,  is (A) (B) (C) (D) Solution From the product rule used to find the derivative of product of two or more functions, Applying this to the above equation, we…

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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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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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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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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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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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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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