Practical Digital Wireless Signals – Measurements and Characteristics
This popular lecture and measurement based course is designed to provide all participants with a physically intuitive understanding of wireless communication signals and why they work the way they do. Based on feedback from students, the material has been expanded to five days to allow more time for measurement demonstrations. With the growing impact of wireless communications on the basic operation of society, the need for a more general understanding of the basis for this technology is more important than ever.
This course approaches wireless communications signals through the window of physics and physical principles. While a solid understanding of the mathematical theory of wireless communications signals is essential for detailed system design and analysis, the fundamental choices in system application and approach are often best approached physically. We do not shun math in this presentation, but instead of using math as the presentation base we instead use it as a follow up illustrator of the principles discussed.
The five days cover all of the major modulations used in digital wireless communication, including ASK, FSK, PSK, QAM, and OFDM. Spread spectrum operation is included, comparing the relative performances of Direct Sequence (DS) and Frequency Hopping (FH) techniques. System principles are also presented such as an extensive discussion of the Shannon Capacity Limit, the physical basis of Nyquist filtering, plus an introduction to antennas and wireless signal propagation. Important system parameters and analysis tools which are common to any modulation type are presented and demonstrated. Public course attendees will receive a copy of the book – Practical Digital Wireless Signals by Dr. Earl McCune.
Dr. McCune has over 35 years of experience in wireless communication technology, systems, and circuit design. He has learned across this career that a thorough understanding of physical fundamentals is essential to avoid making huge mistakes, providing an extremely useful check on mathematical derivations and computer simulations (not to mention young engineers!).
Earl holds over 40 US patents, and is frequently an invited speaker at conferences worldwide. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UC Davis. He has been a Silicon Valley entrepreneur since 1986, starting up two groundbreaking technology companies that both provided successful exits to the investors. His work experience includes NASA, Hewlett-Packard, Watkins-Johnson, Cushman Electronics, Digital RF Solutions (start-up #1), Proxim, Tropian (start-up #2), and Panasonic. He is now a semi-retired consultant, instructor, and visiting professor at multiple universities.
