How to Create a Fractional-Delay Filter

Figure 1. Impulse response (left) and frequency response (right) of a 0.3 samples fractional delay filter with 21 coefficients.

With fractional delay, I mean a delay of a fraction of a sampling period. Introducing a delay of an integer number of samples is easy, since you can do that by simply skipping a number of samples, or buffering them if you don’t want to…

Tom Mon, 06/17/2019 - 09:43
Mapping Bits to a Constellation

Figure 2. Bit mapping for QPSK.

Before information can be transmitted using a digital modulation scheme, the information bits have to be mapped to the constellation. Each point in the constellation is known as a symbol, making the full collection of symbols a kind of alphabet of the modulation scheme. For most digital modulation schemes…

Tom Mon, 05/06/2019 - 09:57
Langton's Ant

Langton's ant

Say that you have an ant that lives on an infinite plain with tiles that can be either black or white. The ant can move in the four main directions, and it keeps moving indefinitely, according to the following two simple rules…

Tom Mon, 04/29/2019 - 09:57
What is a Constellation Diagram?

Figure 1. QPSK constellation.

A constellation diagram is a diagram that shows how the information in a digital modulation scheme such as phase shift keying (PSK) is represented in a modulated carrier. This article is a bit of an experiment; instead of introducing the constellation diagram by simply presenting it…

Tom Mon, 03/25/2019 - 12:54
This Person Does Not Exist

Persons that don't exist.

The image below shows eight faces that were generated through a machine learning technique called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The faces are completely artificial, and do not correspond to…

Tom Tue, 03/05/2019 - 16:50

Tags

What is an Analytic Signal?

Figure 1. Spectra of cosine (left) and complex exponential (right).

An analytic signal is a signal without negative frequency components. This might seem a strange concept if you’re not used to it, but analytic signals are used in signal processing, for example in modems for telecommunications. Let’s start from…

Tom Mon, 02/25/2019 - 09:56
Modems

I’m working on a series of articles on modems. It’ll be a loose collection of posts, and not a true multi-part article such as the one on tomography. Modem technology is not widely known and/or understood, even by a technical audience. However…

Tom Wed, 02/13/2019 - 10:52
One Code to Run Them All (Python 2 and Python 3)

Quite a while ago, I decided to do all my Python programming in Python 3 as much as possible. This is essentially always for the typically small stand-alone programs that I put on this blog. I did this to encourage people to use Python 3 for their own work, and to be future proof. Additionally…

Tom Sat, 01/26/2019 - 16:20

Tags