Course

Wireless Communications and Mobile Antenna Design, Introduction

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Today over half of all network traffic is wireless. In addition to telecommunication, wireless dominates in computing, industrial and IoT applications. This course presents a fundamental approach to understanding wireless communications and standards, in particular 5G. It also covers antenna and transceiver design principles and practices in mobile devices.

The course briefly reviews amplitude modulation (AM) and frequency modulation (FM), which are essential in understanding IQ modulation used in virtually all modern radios (WiFi, OFDM, CDMA, TDMA, 4g, 5g, etc.). Building on these fundamentals, the course examines the industry’s digital wireless standards, including but not limited to IS-136, IS-95, Bluetooth, 4G, 5G, 802.11(a, g, n), and long term evolution (LTE).

It is equally important to understand antennas in any radio system. You will learn about trade-off considerations of antennas for cellphones, Bluetooth, and WiFi. The course discusses trade-offs of antenna size versus range on various configurations, including dipoles, dish, beams, phase arrays, and slotted antennas. The course will cover practical designs used in the Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy and analyze these designs. Instruction emphasizes an intuitive understanding of the fundamentals, rather than complex mathematics.

Topics include:

• Radio architectures: Single conversion, dual conversion, and IQ
• Modulation: AM, FM, SSB, and IQ (TDMA, CDMA, OFDM, QPSK)
• Digital wireless standards: IS-136, IS-95, 3G, 4G, 802.11, and long term evolution (LTE)
• Antennas and propagation

Skills Needed: A general background in electrical engineering and networking.