Digital signal Processing (DSP) is one of the great technological innovations of recent years. It is well established not only in radio communications, but in many other areas of industry including oil exploration, high definition television and compact disc recording.DSP represents the ultimate in flexibility since general purpose DSP hardware may be programmed to perform many varied functions.
It is not possible in this webpage to provide detailed technical information on DSP but I can advise it is about rapidly measuring analogue signals, recording them as a series of numbers, processing them and converting the new sequence back into analogue signals. All of this involves the use of highly complex mathematical formulae, not one of my favourite topics!!
How the numbers are processed depends on which function is being performed. The process of generating a sequence of numbers that represent periodic measurements of a continuous analogue waveform is called sampling. It is critical to ensure that over-sampling does not occur and the proper sampling method is applied in relation to the type of waveform being analysed.
In the world of amateur radio, the ability to construct high performance filters is probably the most important rationale for using DSP in radio transceivers. DSP filters are characterised by their impulse responses and are broadly divided into two classes, viz finite inpulse response and infinite impulse response. The presence or absence of feedback separates the two.
To learn more about DSP it is worth consulting the ARRL Handbook for Radio Communications or the Scientists and Engineers DSP website guide which you will find by clicking here. There is also a useful introductory tutorial to be found here.
Posted Sunday, June 13, 2010 21:34:49 GMT