Design and realization of a 2.45 GHz transmitter and receiver as a modular unit for a MIMO SDR

This paper describes a low-cost transmitting and receiving system for wireless communication. In a first part, the design and realization of a transmitter for modulated data at 2.45 GHz carrier frequency and with frequency, amplitude and phase modulation is handled. A second part explains the design and realization of a receiving module, which filters and downconverts the signals to an intermediate frequency. The postprocessing section describes the use of a DVB-T module together with open-source software, SDR#, for the final downconversion, as well as for the demodulation and the detection of the received signals in order to reproduce the originally transmitted data. Combining all components results in a low-cost and flexible software defined radio system

Realization and MIMO-link measurements of a transmit module for spatial modulation

This paper describes the realization of a circuit that transmits a data stream, through spatial modulation in the 2.45 GHz frequency band. The development of the transmitter includes RF circuit design with components such as a PLL synthesizer, Tx-DAC and IQ-modulator. A microcontroller, integrated into the circuit and programmed in C, is at the heart of the system. In this hardware system, developed specifically for spatial modulation, data is BPSK modulated and transmitted through an RF switch connected to two antennas. It can differ for every symbol which antenna is used, according to an extra series of information bits that are to be transmitted. Here the number of the selected antenna encodes the extra information bit per symbol, which not only results in a doubling of the data rate but also realizes diversity. Spatial modulation allows these features with only a single hardware transmit chain, resulting in low-cost and low-complexity hardware. At the receiving side, the extra information bits are decoded by assessing the channel used for each symbol. This practical system has been thoroughly tested by means of different measuring campaigns. The measurement results show that spatial modulation is correctly demodulated at the receiving side and forms an effective way to realize affordable MIMO systems

Teaching electronics-ICT : from focus and structure to practical realizations

We present a four-year electronics-ICT educational master program at Ghent University in Belgium. The students develop knowledge and skills from novice to experienced electronic circuit designers. In the corresponding topics, the immersion into engineering problems is deepened. The horizontal and vertical alignment of courses in the four-year master program at our university is discussed. The curriculum of the four-year master program is highly projectoriented and all topics are clustered around a well-considered set of standards. This clustering supports the logical structure of the program, with students gradually acquiring the necessary competences. All standards and their mutual interaction are extensively discussed in the paper. We also focus on four design-implement projects included in the electronics-ICT program, explicitly following CDIO-guidelines. Whereas the first-year project has a limited level of difficulty, the challenges increase significantly in the course of the next years. Students learn that product design is an iterative process on different levels, where the design strategy can be changed continuously based on important and crucial feedback. Different evaluations have demonstrated that our students are not only aware of CDIO-principles, but are also convinced of the quality of the results obtained by following the standards

On the design of software and hardware for a WSN transmitter

Software defined radios (SDR) are booming. However, for a final breakthrough these systems need to be versatile, inexpensive and easy to program. In this paper a next step is taken to meet all these requirements. Our hardware consists of a computer with an affordable data acquisition (DAQ) card and a cheap self-made single-stage up-converter. The software is written in the slow learning-curve graphical programming environment LabVIEW. To prove the versatility of our SDR transmitter concept, we send packets with the wireless sensor networks (WSN) protocol IEEE 802.15.4, which are received by an existing packet sniffer

Learning through play: an educational computer game to introduce radar fundamentals

The information exchange has evolved from traditional books to computers and Internet in a few years' time. Our current university students were born in this age: they learn and have fun with different methods as previous generations did. These digital natives enjoy computer games. Thus, designing games for learning some selected topics could be a good teaching strategy for such collective and also for undergraduate university students. This paper describes the development and test of an educational computer game revolving around radar. The objective of the game RADAR Technology is to teach students about the fundamentals of radar, while having fun during the learning experience. Based on the principle that you learn better what you practice, the authors want to induce students to discover a difficult to understand topic by proposing them a different experience, in a format better adapted to their generation skills. The computer game has been tested with actual students and the obtained results seem to be very promising