Digital Communications

This is one of the final hardware modules in the CE degree. It primarily deals with communication formats between devices and how to measure the accuracy of such communicated messages. The topics discussed through the course include linear block codes, entropy, cyclic codes, additive white Gaussian noise and its properties, power spectral density among others.

The course went by fairly smoothly compared to some of the other more turbulent course journeys. The topics were quite mathematical but also intuitive enough to make sense after some practice. Once I got a hang of the procedures and steps needed to approach the questions I was able to breeze through them.

One of the interesting topics of the module was signal modulation. We learnt about three different types of modulation- amplitude, frequency and phase modulation. We also performed many lab experiments on these modulation techniques to further observe them in practice.

There was also a midterm exam that tested these topics since they covered a large bulk of the course content and were also quite important for the final exam. I managed to do well in the midterm exam and received a good grade for it. The lab experience of this module was also a good one since we were encouraged to work with our peers to discuss and perform the procedures together. Learning together with my peers was a great experience since we were all quite well acquainted through previous modules until final year so it was quite fun doing the labs together.

One topic that left me a little perplexed was Gaussian noise. It was very complex in the sense that we were required to look at the Gaussian bell curve and determine some properties from it using integration and algebraic methods. It took me quite a bit of practice to wrap my head around this topic as the math itself was not very intuitive and the problems were also quite complicated. Repeatedly solving the past papers and tutorials helped with this and I was better at, although not entirely confident in, this topic before the final exam.

The module also had a group project where we needed to form groups of five and build a communication system that encodes its messages into codes as per the lecture content and decodes them at the end. I found a few batchmates I was acquainted with from previous years and formed my group with them. The project experience was also quite smooth in that we did not hit any major roadblocks along the way and managed to submit the project well within the stipulated period.

I also did quite well in the final exam and achieved an A grade for the module.