Intuitive Guide to Principles of Communications

December 21, 2013 9:23 PM

Charan Langton (blog) hosts Complex To Real: which "...offers tutorials I have written on various topics in analog and digital communications that will help you cut through this complexity."

There are 32 tutorials of interest to anyone that is curious about how your cellphone or wifi work. All links are PDF's

Tutorial 1 – Basic concepts in signal analysis, power, energy and spectrum

Tutorial 2 – Differential Phase Shift Keying

Tutorial 3 – DVB-S standard, a simplified version

Tutorial 4 – Fourier Analysis Made easy – Chapter 1

Tutorial 5 – Fourier Analysis Made easy – Chapter 2

Tutorial 6 – Discrete Time Fourier Series – Chapter 3

Tutorial 6-2 – Fourier Transform of aperiodic and periodic signals – Chapter 4

Tutorial 6-3 – Discrete Fourier Transform – Part 5

Tutorial 7 – Hilbert Transform and the Complex Envelope

Tutorial 8 – All About Digital Modulation

Tutorial 9 – Baseband, Passband and Amplitude Modulation (AM)

Tutorial 10 – All about Traveling Wave Tube Amplifiers (TWTA) and non-linear amplification

Tutorial 11 – Link Budgets

Tutorial 12 – Convolutional Coding and Decoding Made Easy

Tutorial 13 – Coding Concepts and Block Coding

Tutorial 14 – Inter Symbol Interference (ISI) and Raised cosine filtering

Tutorial 15 – How to interpret an Eye diagram

Tutorial 16 – Partial Response signaling and Quadrature Partial Response (QPR) modulation

Tutorial 17 – Frequency Modulation (FM), FSK, MSK and more

Tutorial 18 – Unlocking the Phase Locked Loop (PLL) – Part 1

Tutorial 19 – Unlocking the Phase Locked Loop (PLL) – Part 2

Tutorial 20 – Modulation performance metrics and computation of BER

Tutorial 21 – Linear Time Invariant systems and Matched filtering

Tutorial 22 – Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM, DMT)

Tutorial 23a – About Lattice and cosets

Tutorial 23b – Trellis coded Modulation (TCM)

Tutorial 24a – Turbo Coding and MAP Decoding – Part 1

Tutorial 24b – The MAP decoding algorithm, step-by-step Part 2, also a companion worksheet in .xls format

Tutorial 25 – Spread spectrum and CDMA

Tutorial 26 – All my filters – Analog, Digital and Adaptive

Tutorial 27 – Finding MIMO

posted by Confess, Fletch (7 comments total)

Fourier Analysis Made Easy

Oh man thank you for this, I have been looking for some material to bone up on Fourier transforms. I notice this goes up through Chapter 7, Fourier Analysis Made Hard.
posted by charlie don't surf at 10:20 PM on December 21, 2013

Somehow I managed to escape Cornell with a BSEE in 1984, resolving to, someday, ACTUALLY LEARN what I had been "taught" while I was there. Looks like it's finally time ... thanks.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 10:53 PM on December 21, 2013

Best Christmas present a chap could wish for! Or chapesse, natch.
posted by Devonian at 3:28 AM on December 22, 2013

Fantastic stuff, thanks Confess and Charan Langton!
posted by Twang at 6:54 AM on December 22, 2013

Thanks Confess, Fletch.

If you like Tutorial 7, I can also recommend Quadrature Signals: Complex, But Not Complicated. Until I read this, I struggled for a long time to get a grasp on this whole complex signal thing.
A great free resource for an introduction into digital filters, ADCs and DACs is The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing
posted by mirage pine at 11:31 AM on December 22, 2013

Thanks, this is awesome stuff! Too bad I found this right after I finished my class in image processing. I'll still read it anyway. I found these pages very helpful while learning and studying DSP and Fourier Transforms.
posted by tenpointwo at 2:23 PM on December 22, 2013 [1 favorite]

I have always wanted to learn about this - thanks
posted by thelonius at 6:45 PM on December 22, 2013