Page 33 - Fundamentals of Communications Systems

Acknowledgements

The professional acknowledgements are numerous. First I should thank the
vast network of intelligent communication engineers that came before me pro-
fessionally. Their great work inspired me with the passion to write this book
(I will not name names as I will forget a well-deserving person). I must thank
Dale Feikema and Dan Jones who trusted a wet behind the ears engineer (me)
with a way cool communication system engineering job. Man that was fun, too
bad I can never tell anyone about it! William Lindsey my advisor at the Univer-
sity of Southern California was a great role model for hard work and technical
competence that I tried to take into my professional life. My time at TRW and
Northrop Grumman and the exposure to a wide range of technical expertise
taught me a breadth of system engineering expertise that is not often found in
a textbook writer. I must thank the industrial sponsors of my research for in
working on so-called “practical” and important problems I was able to formulate
a modern way of viewing communication theory and derive many interesting
homework problems. Hopefully I have brought the sum total of that experience
into this text.
I shared my academic life with three superb faculties and these colleagues
greatly influenced my growth as an engineer/educator. Professors whose inter-
action influenced this book include Peter Doerschuk (PD), Saul Gelfand, James
Krogmeier, Randy Moses, Oscar Takeshita, Lee Potter, Phil Schniter, Urbashi
Mitra (UM), and Rick Wesel (RW). Other people (that I know of) who provided
reviews that changed the manuscript for the better include Jerome Gansman
(JG) and Youjian Liu. Daniel Costello gave me some well heeded professional
advice and provide his talk on the “Genesis of Coding” which I was able to use
to help make comparisons of the best modern signaling schemes to Shannon’s
bounds. Homework problems that I liked and were authored by other people
and included in the book are annotated by the author’s initials. I thank them for
sharing. Oscar Takeshita and Jerome Gansman were helpful in sharing typeset
homework solutions.
Financial support by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United
States of America should be acknowledged. The constant support through my
academic career by NSF made this book possible without me having to starve
my children.

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