Assignments and Labs

The assignments will be posted below on Fridays, and will be due one week later. You are welcome to work together, but hand in your own writeups.

Labs are described in the web pages below. Your solutions for these should be emailed to me at gill@ee.stanford.edu.

In order to understand communications well, it is very helpful to capture some signals yourself, and take them apart in matlab. We will do this in the lab component of the course.

The labs are based on software define radios, or SDR's. These are receivers that directly capture a large segment of the RF spectrum, and save the raw data to your computer. You can load the data in matlab, and then write your own m-files to extract the signals you are interested in. You can also stream it live.

There are many SDR's available now. The ones we'll use are designed for watching TV broadcast from satellites, called DVB-T. It is a small USB dongle that plugs into your computer. It will capture signals from about 24 MHz, up to about 1.7 GHz, which is most of the communications spectrum.

An outline of the topics is here.

Labs

Lab 1: Due Friday Oct. 1. The slides on the RF Spectrum are here
Lab 2: Due Friday Oct 8
Homework 1: Due Friday Oct. 8
Lab 3: Due Friday Oct. 15
Homework 2: Due Monday Oct. 15
Lab 4: Due Friday Oct. 22
Lab 5: Due Friday Oct. 29
Lab 6: Due Friday Nov 5
Lab 7: Due Friday Nov 12
Lab 8: Due Friday Nov 19
Final Project: Due Friday Dec 10