Am getting ready to be back posting frequently.

Please see below the top 50 articles of this blog based on the pageviews in the month of September 2011 (used Google Analytics to pick up this data).

Why am I posting this information? Well, wait for the next post …

Related posts:

1. dspLog turns two! Happy Birthday!
2. Comparing 16PSK vs 16QAM for symbol error rate
3. BER for BPSK in OFDM with Rayleigh multipath channel

Wishing all the readers of dsplog.com a great year 2010 !

Its been a mixed year for dsplog. Some key milestones

a) Crossing 1000 subscribers with 1100+ comments in March 2009
b) Crossing 100 posts with 2200 subscribers and 2600+ comments in October 2009
c) As I write this, we have 102 posts with 2603 subscribers and 3600+ comments.

Towards the last three months, the posting frequency has drastically dropped. Partly attributed to paucity of time following my change of employer and of course, laziness.

Hoping for a great year 2010.

Related posts:

1. dspLog turns two! Happy Birthday!
2. Happy Birthday – dspLog
3. Summary – feedback on [dspLog], July 2008

As on 21st October 2007, we moved from blogspot domain at  to the self hosted domain at http://www.dsplog.com. Over the last two years, the blog has grown quite a bit, and am reasonably happy with the progress. Let us look back at the positives and negatives over the last year.

The positives

Around the same time last year (i.e in October 2007), we had around 65+ posts and 300+ subscribers. As on today, we have

• 100 posts
• 2200+ subscribers and
• 2600+ comments

Some of the new topics which we discussed this year are

• MIMO
• Viterbi decoder

As traffic statistics, we have around*

• 40,000 page views per month
• 16,000 visits per month
• Average visit time of 3 minutes, 40 seconds

The top 5 countries based on the visitor location are*

• US
• India
• South Korea
• United Kingdom
• China

The top 5 articles are*

• Bit Error Probability for BPSK modulation
• BER for BPSK in Rayleigh channel
• Download free e-Book for error rates in AWGN
• Compare BPSK, QPSK, 16QAM, 16PSK, 64QAM etc
• Maximal Ratio Combining

* – based on Google Analytics data for September 2009

The negatives

My goal is to maintain around 4 posts per month, but over the last two months or so, it dropped to two posts or sometimes one posts per month. I will put efforts to improve on that aspect.

Feedback

I created a poll to collect your feedback on the aspect you like most in dspLog. You can chose any one from Articles/Matlab-C code/Comments/Web page template.

Note: RSS/email subscribers need to visit the site for participating and seeing the results from the poll.

Related posts:

1. Happy New Year 2010
2. Happy Birthday – dspLog
3. Matlab or C for Viterbi Decoder?

While browsing through the web for materials on the wireless communication and implementation, found this rich set of articles as part of MIT OPEN COURSEWARE program. The course is from Vladimir Stojanovic, course materials for 6.973 Communication System Design, Spring 2006. MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I quickly browsed through the articles. Most of the contents are heavy, and I guess suited for a practicing communication system design engineer. You may check out the material using the links given below. I have added some of the material to my study list. Wish me luck.

Course Description

This course presents a top-down approach to communications system design. The course will cover communication theory, algorithms and implementation architectures for essential blocks in modern physical-layer communication systems (coders and decoders, filters, multi-tone modulation, synchronization sub-systems). The course is hands-on, with a project component serving as a vehicle for study of different communication techniques, architectures and implementations. This year, the project is focused on WLAN transceivers. At the end of the course, students will have gone through the complete WLAN System-On-a-Chip design process, from communication theory, through algorithm and architecture all the way to the synthesized standard-cell RTL chip representation.

Topics

The course will focus on four major categories as outlined below:

1. Introduction to digital communications
   • Modulation and detection, vector channel representation
   • Equalization
   • Multi-channel systems (modulation methods, waterfiling, bit loading)
   • Practical examples including 802.11a
   • Coding – sequence detection, gap, convolutional and block codes
2. ASIC design fundamentals
   • ASIC design flow, tools, system-on-a-chip design issues
   • Micro-architectures and transformations (parallelism, pipelining, folding, time-multiplexing)
   • Hardware description languages: introduction to Bluespec™ and Verilog® review
3. Theory and building blocks
   • Fast fourier transform (theory, fast algorithms and VLSI implementations)
   • Convolutional and Trellis codes, and Viterbi algorithm (theory, algorithms and VLSI implementations)
   • Synchronization (phase and frequency tracking loops, algorithms and VLSI implementations)
   • Block codes (Hamming, BCH, Reed-Solomon), basic theory and VLSI implementations
4. Wireless channel fundamentals
   • Properties and modeling (fading, Doppler effect,…)
   • Channel estimation (theory and VLSI implementations)

Lecture Notes

Important links

Course Home

Syllabus

Reading list

Lecture Notes

Assignments

Exams

Download Course Materials

Reference

Vladimir Stojanovic, course materials for 6.973 Communication System Design, Spring 2006. MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Related posts:

1. Objective
2. Example of Cascaded Integrator Comb filter in Matlab
3. ICCBN 2008, July 17-20 2008, IISc, Bangalore

My friend Mr. Balaji volunteers for Vibha, a non-profit  organization whose mission is to ensure that every underprivileged child attains his or her right to education, health and opportunity.

Vibha, which was founded in 1991 has a volunteer network of 825 members spread across Atlanta, Austin, Bay Area, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Jacksonville, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Twin Cities – Minnesota, New York, Philadelphia, Sacramento, Washington DC and several other cities across the US and India. Till date, we have supported about 190 projects in India and the US. You may read more about their projects here.

To support Vibha’s cause, Mr Balaji has set up a donation page – The Dream Mile … A few miles for a million dreams . The Dream Mile 5k/10k Run/Walk is Vibha’s flagship event for increasing awareness and raising funds to help underprivileged children. Vibha has chosen  My New Red Shoes as one of the beneficiaries of this event.

To find out more about My New Red Shoes, please watch the video below.

To find out more about Alamb, a project by Vibha in India, please watch the video below.

If you like some of the work done by Vibha, please consider making a donation to the cause. As Mr. Balaji has mentioned:

$120 can provide education to a child for a whole year

$50 can facilitate the rehabilitation of a mentally handicapped child for a year

$40 can sponsor the non-formal education of a child for a whole year.

To donate for this cause, please visit the donation page The Dream Mile … A few miles for a million dreams

Thanks again for your support.

No related posts.

Those who are regular visitors to dsplog.com might have noticed the small FeedBurner chicklet on the side showing subscriber count showing 1000+ subscribers. Its a nice milestone to reach, one that looked so distant when I wrote the first post stating the objective of this blog on 26th February 2007. We now have around 86 articles with 1100+ comments.

dashboard on dsplog.com

Brief History

• First post : Objective February 26th 2007
• Migration from Blogger to to self hosted domain @ dsplog.com : October 2007
• Migration to Deep Blue theme : May 4th 2008
• Availability of free e-Book on Error Rates in AWGN : October 1st 2008
• Migration to Who’s Who theme : January 13th 2009

Subscribe

The rate of new subscribers improved dramatically once I introduced the free e-Book in October of 2008.

Joining the email subscription list entitles you to receive the free e-Book on Probability of Error for BPSK/QPSK/16QAM/16PSK/64QAM in AWGN.

Subscribe and download the free e-Book

Alternatively, you may subscribe to the RSS feed by clicking here.

Future

While writing the posts, making the simulations to work and responding to all those comments, I learned a lot over the last two years. The signalprocessing for wireless comunication is a vast area and we have only just briefly started. I hope to continue to discuss topic relavent to signal processing for comuniction.

I am hoping that reaching the next 1000 subscribers wont take another two years, and for achieveing that I need your help. If each of you can tell atleast five of your friends/colleagues about this blog, it will go a long way in spreading the word about the blog. Thanks in advance.

Other thoughts

Over the past 6 to 8 weeks, I know that am guilty of not keeping up with the one past per week target which I have set myself nor am able to respond to comments within 2-3 days. I am not able to squeeze sufficient time for blogging after office work and parenting. I hope to come back to one post per week cycle from the second week of April 2009.

Related posts:

1. dspLog turns two! Happy Birthday!
2. Happy New Year 2010
3. Summary – feedback on [dspLog], July 2008

After a gap of around 7 months, we decided to migrate to a new template (recall, last time we changed was in May 2008). The template which we decided to use  is designed by Elegant Themes. They have a wide array of themes and I chose to use the Who’s Who theme.

Some of the key changes to look forward are:

(a) We have a logo! I used the blank black gif file which came along with the template and worked on it for 30 minutes using Gimp. Hope you like the result.

(b) Provision for nested comments. Following the responses to your comments might have got a bit easier.

(c) The Categories is listed a blue bar on the top of the page. Enables easier navigation for a new visitor.

(d) Each post has a Share option at the top of the post. Enables a user to submit the article to a social bookmarking site, if he/she chooses to.

(e) The post ratings moved to top of the post.

(f) The Google FriendConnect widget is moved to bottom of the page. Saves screen real estate.

(g) The archives listed as a drop down menu rather than a big list. Saves screen real estate.

Hope you like the new look and feel of the blog. Kindly do share your feedback.

Note:

There are some features which I am yet to enable in the new template. Hope to do so in the next few days.

Related posts:

1. OT: Migration to a Deep Blue template
2. Milestone 1000+ subscribers 1100+ comments
3. Summary – feedback on [dspLog], July 2008