In order to understand communications well, it is very helpful to capture some signals yourself, and take them apart in matlab. We will do this in the lab component of the course.
The labs are based on software define radios, or SDR's. These are receivers that directly capture a large segment of the RF spectrum, and save the raw data to your computer. You can load the data in matlab, and then write your own m-files to extract the signals you are interested in. You can also stream it live.
There are many SDR's available now. The ones we'll use are designed for watching TV broadcast from satellites, called DVB-T. It is a small USB dongle that plugs into your computer. It will capture signals from about 24 MHz, up to about 1.7 GHz, which is most of the communications spectrum.
You can sign up for an extra unit for the lab component. Register in EE 191 with Pauly as the instructor.
An outline of the topics is here.
We will have a weekly session to go over the labs and debug them. These are
Lab 1: Due Wednesday April 9th