A Tuned radio Frequency Receiver (TRF) selects the desired channel through a bandpass filter

Tuned Radio Frequency (TRF) Receiver

The tasks of a communications receiver to demodulate the transmitted signal begin with selecting the signal within a specific bandwidth at a desired frequency, commonly known as a particular channel. In another article, we discuss specifications for a radio receiver such as dynamic range, noise floor and sensitivity. Today we discuss an architecture used in earlier generations of radios. To avoid interference from the neighboring channels, the most straightforward approach is to filter out the spectral contents outside this channel and amplify the desired signal in one or more RF amplification stages. This was one of the earliest techniques employed

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6G

The Arrival of 6G

Recently, IEEE Communications Society published an article “What will 6G be?” Some of the important points it highlighted are the following. More spectrum is needed for more bits: As with all new Gs, more spectrum is needed to entertain more bits 🙂 Sometimes I wonder where exactly we have made a phenomenal progress in delivering orders of magnitude higher data rates. According to Gerhard Fettweis, several bands between 100 and 300 GHz show some promise. Bits/s/$m^3$: Since the success of a company is measured in the revenue generated, and not exactly the bits delivered per second, the real focus is

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Complex sinusoids drawn to highlight the discrete frequency axis k on the left side

Discrete Frequency

An Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) samples a continuous-time signal to produce discrete-time samples. For a digital signal processor, this signal just resides in memory as a sequence of numbers. Consequently, the knowledge of the sample rate $F_S$ is the key to signal manipulation in digital domain. As far as time is concerned, one can easily determine the period or frequency of such a signal stored in the memory. For example, the period $T$ in the sinusoid of Figure below is clearly $10$ samples and sample time $T_S=1/F_S$ can be employed to find its period in seconds. For a sample

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Setup for Differential Phase Difference of Arrival (DPDoA)

Location Estimation through Differential Phase Difference of Arrival

In an article on carrier phase based ranging, we saw how phase observations were employed to find the range between two wireless devices. Today we explore how phase can also be used for the purpose of location estimation. Background To determine the position of a wireless device, its range needs to be computed from a set of anchor nodes. When these anchors and the device itself are synchronized with each other, the signal propagation time of an electromagnetic wave arriving at these anchors after its emission from a Tx can be employed to calculate the corresponding distances. This is the

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Magnitude of frequency response |H[k]| in response to complex sinusoids at all N frequencies

System Characterization

In wireless communications and other applications of digital signal processing, we often want to modify a generated or acquired signal. A device or algorithm that performs some prescribed operations on an input signal to generate an output signal is called a system. In another article about transforming a signal, we saw how a signal can be scaled and time shifted, or added and multiplied with another signal. These are all examples of a system. Amplifiers in communication receivers and filters in image processing applications are some systems that we interact with in daily lives. A communication channel is also a

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