Page 19 - Fundamentals of Communications Systems

Preface xvii

part of the class as the concept of noise and random processes are mathe-
matically abstract. Undergraduates are not used to abstract concepts being
important in practice.
8. Chapter 10 — 3 hours. These lectures introduce bandpass random pro-
cesses. This goes fairly well once Chapter 9 has been swallowed.
9. Chapter 11 — 3 hours. These lectures introduce fidelity analysis and the
resulting SNR for each of the modulation types that have been introduced.
The payoff for all the hard work to understand random processes.
10. Test — 1 hour.

The 30 hour digital only communication course followed the analog course so
it could build on the material in the previous course. This course often contained
some graduate students from outside the communications field that sat in on
the course so some review was necessary. The course outline for 30 lecture hours
of digital communications is
1. Chapter 1 & 4 — 2 hours. These lectures introduce communications and
bandpass signals.
2. Chapter 9 & 10 — 2 hours. These lectures introduce noise and noise in
communication systems.
3. Chapter 12 — 1 hour. This lecture introduces the concept of digital modula-
tion and the performance metrics that engineers use in designing systems.
This lecture also introduces Shannon’s limits in digital communications.
4. Chapter 13 — 6 hours. These lectures emphasize the five-step design process
inherent in digital communications. In the end these lectures show how far
single-bit transmission is from Shannon’s limit.
5. Chapter 14 — 4 hours. These lectures show how to extend the single bit
concepts to M-ary modulation. These lectures show how to achieve different
performance-spectral efficiency trade-offs and how to approach Shannon’s
limit.
6. Chapter 15 — 8 hours. These lectures introduce most of the modulation
formats used in engineering practice by examing the complexity associated
with demodulation.
7. Chapter 16 — 3 hours. These lectures introduce bandwidth efficient trans-
mission and tools used to test digital communication systems.
8. Chapter 17 — 2 hours. These lectures introduce coded modulations as a way
to reach Shannon’s bounds.
9. Test — 1 hour.
The 40–45 hour analog and digital communication course I taught tradition-
ally had a much more aggressive schedule. The course outline for 40 lecture
hours of communications is