Page 17 - Fundamentals of Communications Systems

Preface

My goal in teaching communications (and in authoring this text) is to provide
students with
■ an exposition of the theory required to build modern communication systems.
■ an insight into the required trade-offs between spectral efficiency of trans-
mission, fidelity of message reconstruction, and complexity of system imple-
mentation that are required for a modern communication system design.
■ a demonstration of the utility and applicability of the theory in the homework
problems and projects.
■ a logical progression in thinking about communication theory.

Consequently, this textbook will be more mathematical than most and does not
discuss examples of communication systems except as a way to illustrate how
important communication theory concepts solve real engineering problems. My
experience has been that my approach works well in an elective class where
students are interested in communication careers or as a self-study guide to
communications. My approach does not work as well when the class is a required
course for all electrical engineering students as students are less likely to see
the advantage of developing tools they will not be using in their career. Matlab
is used extensively to illustrate the concepts of communication theory as it is
a great visualization tool and probably the most prevalent system engineering
tool used in practice today. To me the beauty of communication theory is the
logical flow of ideas. I have tried to capture this progression in this text. Only
you the reader will be able to decide how I have done in this quest.

Teaching from This Text
This book is written for the modern communications curriculum. The course
objectives for an undergraduate communication course that can be taught from
this text are (along with their ABET criteria)
■ Students learn the bandpass representation for carrier modulated signals.
(Criterion 3(a))

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