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This is part three of an article that describes the signal path of a radio meteor. The next step is sampling. At the point of sampling, there is a difference between a real-world BRAMS system and the simulation that produced the illustrations in this series of articles. In the real system… read more

This is part two of an article that describes the signal path of a radio meteor. At the antenna of the receiver, the reflected signal is combined with a (much smaller) directly received signal. At first sight this might seem unimportant, since the amplitude of the direct component is typically much less than… read more

If you’ve enjoyed, or simply read, my articles on the BRAMS network, you might be interested in the Radio Meteor Zoo. The Radio Meteor Zoo is a so-called citizen science project. In these kinds of projects, members of the public can help scientists with… read more

This is part one of a rather basic article that describes the complete signal path of a radio meteor, from the sinusoidal carrier wave that is initially transmitted, to the spectrogram that is typically used as the final result in the receiving chain. I have presented this material at… read more

In digital communications, the measure of the signal to noise ratio of a signal is Eb/N0. Why is that? To figure it out, let’s start from the classical SNR, which is the ratio of the average signal power S to the average noise power N, given by… read more

Not that I am going to try, but it is difficult to underestimate the importance of the first detection of gravitational waves for physics. Apart from the fact that it is another gloriously successful test for general relativity, it actually opens up a new observational window on the universe… read more

This article presents spectral reversal, a technique to turn a low-pass filter into a high-pass filter. Spectral reversal is an alternative for spectral inversion, as described in How to Create a Simple High-Pass Filter. Starting from the cutoff frequency… read more

When researching what to include in The Moving Average as a Filter and Variations on the Moving Average, I came across a lot of references to applications in the financial sector. This is not my forte, but, just for fun, I gave a few of the moving averages that are used there the same treatment as the filters in… read more

The low-pass single-pole IIR filter is a very useful tool to have in your DSP toolbox. Its performance in the frequency domain may not be stellar, but it is very computationally efficient. A low-pass single-pole IIR filter has a single design parameter, which is the decay value d. It is customary to define parameters… read more

The moving-average filter is a strong performer in the time domain, but not in the frequency domain. For those cases where you have to work with data for which both domains are important, there are “weighted” versions of the moving average that are… read more