Wireless/SDR Archives

August 31, 2023 DSP / Wireless/SDR

How Automatic Gain Control (AGC) Works

Alfred North Whitehead said, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." In today’s world, it is easy to take no notice of the level of process automation integrated into our lives. To have an idea of how things were in the early days, signal processing technology to sort out the radar picture on a map was not available and only a dot or a line could be generated on the screen representing a detected target. A radar operator had to stare at a screen for their whole shift to raise

June 22, 2024 DSP / Wireless/SDR

The Power of Pulse Compression

Human eyes can only see in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radar (Radio Detection and Ranging) is a device that extends our ability to detect the environment far beyond what is allowed by the visual nervous system, see the article on Frequency Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) radars. Today we talk about the idea of pulse compression and the role it plays in target detection. As opposed to a Continuous-Wave (CW) radar, a pulsed radar transmits a short burst of energy followed by a period of silence during which it listens for the echo received from the target. As shown

May 17, 2023 DSP / Wireless/SDR

Top 5 Software Defined Radios (SDR) for RF Experimentation

In this article, I describe 5 of the most popular SDRs available for RF experimentation today. As a 6th member of this list, I include a surprisingly common and free SDR that can be used for your fun radio projects. Table of Contents Background Where We Came From Top SDRs 5. Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) 4. LimeSDR 3. HackRF One 2. ADALM-Pluto 1. RTL-SDR 0. A Free SDR We start with a little bit of background and where we came from. Background Software Defined Radio (SDR) has revolutionized wireless communication in the same way Microsoft revolutionized the scope of

A figurative example of IQ imbalance depicting potential sources of mismatches

March 20, 2023 Wireless/SDR

Direct Conversion (Zero-IF) Receiver

The frontend of the transceiver plays a crucial role in determining the ultimate system performance. In a previous article, we described how a superheterodyne architecture helps in enhancing the selectivity and sensitivity of the receiver. Some of the main issues with a superheterydone receiver are the image frequency and a large form factor due to multiple conversion stages. Today we discuss a direct conversion architecture, also known as zero-IF and homodyne. Recall from the concept of frequency domain that a real sinusoid at the Local Oscillator (LO) output has two impulses in its spectrum, one at a positive frequency $+F_{\text{LO}}$

DDS waveform and spectrum after dithering

January 31, 2023 DSP / Wireless/SDR

Direct Digital Synthesizer (DDS)

A Direct Digital Synthesizer (DDS) is an integral part of all modern communication systems. It is a technique to produce a desired waveform, usually a sinusoid, through employing digital signal processing algorithms. As an example, in the transmitter (Tx) of a digital communication system, a Local Oscillator (LO) is required to generate a carrier sinusoid that upconverts the modulated signal to its allocated frequency in the spectrum. On the receive (Rx) side, another local oscillator downconverts this high frequency signal to baseband for further processing. Such a process is shown in the Tx and Rx block diagrams of a Quadrature