Wireless Communications from the Ground Up

Book excerpt: The book starts with a completely fresh perspective on introduction to signals and continues to dealing with complex numbers without any complicated mathematics. The only skills you require are addition, multiplication and knowing what cos and sin are! The topics of discrete domains - both time and frequency - are explained in an intuitive manner such that traveling between the two through Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) becomes quite natural. Furthermore, the concepts needed to implement modern digital communication systems such as convolution, filters and multirate signal processing are illustrated through the help of beautiful figures. Next, the book demystifies modulation and demodulation in a way easy to grasp even for a non-technical reader. The focus is on linear modulations, particularly Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM), Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) and Phase Shift Keying (PSK). Matched filtering is clarified in time, frequency and mathematical details in a story-like development. In addition, the topic of pulse shape filtering is covered in a depth and from angles never described anywhere before. The book continues with stethoscopes of a communication system, namely eye diagrams and scatter plots and towards the error rates of various modulation schemes along with the energy scaling factors of respective blocks. Finally, their spectral efficiencies are described taking into account the bandwidth, signal-to-noise ratio and data rates. This text is a simple way for you to enter at the beginner level and make your way up to wireless system design. Mathematics is included at a school level. I rely more on visualizing equations through beautiful figures. Therefore, you will encounter numerous figures throughout the text with logical and intuitive explanations. But you will not encounter any integrals, probability theory and detection/estimation theory. You will not even find any e or j of complex numbers either. The most complicated notation I have used is "sum everything from N1 to N2."