  In this paper, we investigate the problem of transmitting an analog source to
a destination over $N$ uses of an additive-white-Gaussian-noise (AWGN) channel,
where $N$ is very small (in the order of 10 or even less). The proposed coding
scheme is based on representing the source symbol using a novel progressive
expansion technique, partitioning the digits of expansion into $N$ ordered
sets, and finally mapping the symbols in each set to a real number by applying
the reverse progressive expansion. In the last step, we introduce some gaps
between the signal levels to prevent the carry-over of the additive noise from
propagation to other levels. This shields the most significant levels of the
signal from an additive noise, hitting the signal at a less significant level.
The parameters of the progressive expansion and the shielding procedure are
opportunistically independent of the $\SNR$ so that the proposed scheme
achieves a distortion $D$, where $-\log(D)$ is within $O(\log\log(\SNR))$ of
the optimal performance for all values of $\SNR$, leading to a channel-agnostic
scheme.
