Page 20 - Fundamentals of Communications Systems

xviii Preface

1. Chapters1&2—1 hour. The signal and systems topics were a review of a
previous class.
2. Chapter 4 — 2 hours. These lectures build heavily on Fourier transform
theory and the frequency translation theorem of the Fourier transform.
3. Chapter 5 — 1 hour. This lecture introduces the concept of analog modula-
tion and the performance metrics that engineers use in designing systems.
4. Chapter6—4 hours. These lectures introduce amplitude modulation and
demodulation algorithms. The focus of the presentation was limited to co-
herent demodulators and the envelope detector.
5. Chapter 7 — 4.5 hours. These lectures introduce angle modulation and
demodulation algorithms. I like to emphasize that the understanding of the
spectrum of angle modulations is best facilitated by the use of the Fourier
series.
6. Chapter 8 — 0.5 hour. Only covered multiplexing.
7. Chapters 3 &9—5 hours. This is the toughest part of the class as the
concept of noise and random processes are mathematically abstract. Un-
dergraduates are not used to abstract concepts being important in practice.
8. Chapter 10 — 2 hours. This goes fairly well once Chapter 9 has been swal-
lowed.
9. Chapter 11 — 2 hours. The payoff for all the hard work to understand
random processes.
10. 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.
11. Chapter 13 — 6 hours. These lectures emphasize the five-step design pro-
cess inherent in digital communications. In the end these lectures show
how far single-bit transmission is from Shannon’s limit.
12. 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.
13. Chapter 15 — 3 hours. These lectures introduce most of the modulation
formats used in engineering practice by examing the complexity associated
with demodulation.
14. Chapter 16 — 1 hours. These lectures introduce bandwidth efficient trans-
mission and tools used to test digital communication systems.
15. Chapter 17 — 1 hours. These lectures introduce coded modulations as a
way to reach Shannon’s bounds.
16. Test — 1 hour.

The 45 hour course added more details in the digital portion of the course.