EE3150: Communication Systems Lab

Instructor

• Dr. Marco Tacca

Department of Electrical Engineering

The University of Texas at Dallas.

Telephone: (972) 883-6239

Email: mtacca@utdallas.edu

Website: www.utdallas.edu/~mtacca/

Office Hours: TBA
Room: ECSN3.522

Teaching Assistants

TBA

Course Objective

This is a companion laboratory to EE 3350. It covers: fundamental elements of communications systems hardware; use of spectrum analyzers and other measurement instruments typically encountered in communication systems; design of active filters in communications systems; analog frequency and amplitude modulators and demodulators; data communication systems.
Corequisite: EE 3350 - Digital Circuits.

• You must download the lab manual from here one week before the experiment date.

• In this course, all the spectral functions must be expressed as functions of the variable f with units of Hertz, do not use and rad/sec. Appendix A is a table of Fourier transform pairs in terms of f.

• Software required to complete some of the experiments is PSPICE, which is available in the campus computer labs.

• You will also need to use ANY software (MATLAB, MATHCAD, Excel, etc.) with plotting capabilities in order to create graphs from analytical functions. Some MATLAB scripts will be provided as hints throughout the course; however, MATLAB programming is not a pre-requisite and will not be taught in this course.

• You must perform the prelab individually. You may seek help from the instructor or the TA to complete the prelab. Their office hours are posted in the website.

• Prelab is due at the end of the lab period. LATE prelabs will NOT be accepted under any circumstance.

• Make sure to sign up your name in the attendance sheet in every experiment.

• During the lab period, upon the completion of a significant step (measurement or observation) ask the TA to verify your results. DO NOT PROCEED to the next step until the TA has verified and taken note of your results.

• Lab reports must be done individually and are due at the beginning of the following experiment. LATE REPORTS will be penalized by 30% if are submitted within one week of the due date, and NOT accepted after one week.

Grading Policy

Final grade in this course will be based on 6 laboratory assignments. All labs have an equal weight in the final grade. Grading will be based on pre-lab work, laboratory reports and in-lab. performance (i.e., completing lab, answering laboratory related questions, etc.). TAs and/or the instructor will ask pertinent questions to individual members of a team at random.

Labs will be graded as per the following grading policy:

In-lab. performance (i.e., completing lab, answering laboratory related questions, etc.) will be graded with the following procedure. TAs will ask pertinent questions to individual members of a team at random during each lab. Additionally, each student must sign up his/her name in the attendance sheet in every experiment.

Each lab will equally contribute to the final grade.

Laboratory Report

• Lab and pre-lab. reports will be written individually.

• Please do not copy lab. reports! You will only cheat yourself, if you do. Please read the UT Dallas policy on scholastic dishonesty at:

        http://www.utdallas.edu/student/slife/dishonesty.html

• Please use the following format for your lab. reports:

  • Cover: Includes course number, topic of the assignment, names of team members and your section.

  • Abstract: Brief introduction to the assignment and a summary of results.

  • For the rest of the report please follow the instructions given in individual laboratory assignments.

Reports Due Dates

Pre-lab reports are due by the end of the first corresponding lab. Reports are due one week after completion of the correponding lab. Late pre-lab will not be accepted. Late lab report will receive a 30% penalty. Reports that are turned in one week after the deadline will not be accepted and will not count toward the final grade.