Hands-On digital communications using your soundcard¶

Welcome to this course on designing your own digital transmitter and receiver using the sound device of your PC. In this course you will learn the basics of baseband and passband modulation and demodulation and the additionally required parts such as synchronization, channel coding and frame structures.

For running the examples it is recommended to use a dedicated sound device, such that (though very improbable) misconfigurations would destroy your main sound device. As an external USB sound card is very cheap, this safety measure is clearly worth the effort. In addition, it allows you to still listen to music while working with the code :-) For a recommendation of sound device, speaker and microphone, please refer to the documentation on DSPIllustrations.com.

Below, you find the table of contents with links to the Jupyter notebooks for running all the experiments.

Table of Contents¶

HTML Setting up the Development Environment
HTML Setting Up The Audio Interface
HTML Using the Simulated Audio Channel
HTML Baseband transmission
HTML Passband transmission
HTML Symbol Timing Recovery
HTML Channel Coding, Frame Structure and Higher Layers 1
HTML Channel Coding, Frame Structure and Higher Layers 2
HTML Our first end-to-end data transmission
HTML Transmit custom data
HTML Fixing the problem of lost frames

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Last updated: January 8th, 2025

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