Radio Receiver Design
This reference focuses on understanding and designing radio receivers and systems, presenting the characteristics of individual receiver components and their interaction in cascade.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Radio Receiver Design
1.8: Sanity Checking
1.8 Sanity Checking
The late Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman once related this story about his childhood.
We had the Encyclopedia Britannica at home. When I was a small boy, [my father] used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Britannica. We would be reading, say, about dinosaurs. It would be talking about the Tyrannosaurus rex, and it would say something like, "This dinosaur is twenty-five feet high and its head is six feet across." My father would stop reading and say, "Now let's see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard, he would be tall enough to put his head through our window up here." (We were on the second floor.) "But his head would be too wide to fit in the window." Everything he read to me he would translate as best he could into some reality.
(Feynman, What do you care what other people think?)
Often we encounter specifications that do not make sense until we put the information into familiar terms. Following are some everyday examples.
Bit Error Rate
A contractor once told the authors his system would produce a bit error rate (BER) of 10 -20. Is this reasonable? A bit error rate of 10 -20 means we will experience one bit error for every 10 20 bits processed. Let us assume we can measure bit error rates at 10 MHz. In other words, we can...
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