VMSK/2 Promises 5 Times More Bandwidth 124
ksan writes "Acording to
this article in EDN Magazine; VMSK/2, a new modulation technique may improve modem, FM, AM and other types of transmission. They say that its possible to transmit 100 channels of 128kbps MP3 over an FM channel. Anyone can say more about this?"Read below to find out the *major* problems with this article.
DSL comparison. (Score:1)
Re:Redshifting radio? (Score:2)
This is a emf signal, not a sound wave. How fast do you drive?
Doppler happens with any motion. How do you think the nice traffic officer figures out how fast you're moving? With the precision of this modulation scheme, the little bit of doppler that happens will become significant.
It's greatly exaggerated (Score:2)
After reading this article my impression is the author decided to exaggerate the technology to make his article more exciting. From what I've heard so far, the maximum transfer rates VMSK/2 will achieve is around 256kbit/s in optimal conditions. Most users can expect better then dual channel ISDN, which I think is pretty good for wireless.
Note: These are my personal views and do not reflect the views of Alphacom Communications.
Re:Woo hoo. (Score:2)
Do you really believe that? If you live in the US, then the airwaves are owned (licensed? bought? stolen?) by a few large media corporations. Infinity, Clear Channel, and AMFM come to mind. Learn more about the situation at http://www.mediademocracynow.org [mediademocracynow.org].
If you really want the airwaves to be free, join us in protest of the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) on September 20-23 in San Francisco during their convention.
Ryan
Re:how they do that? (Score:1)
I have vague recollections of polar plots (phase and amplitude). Each pulse is a point in this graph. Depending on how good your circuitry is, you can discriminate finer and finer regions. Ig you have 8 regions, you send 3 bits per pulse.
So if you believe that as a very rough sketch, you can extrapolate that better phase/aplitude detection allows you to discrimnate 2^19 regions. Hrm that sounds like a lot. Maybe not; assume 8 bits amplitude, that leaves you 2^11 bits phase, which you can do at 2048 hz sample rate.
How they then go to 2^90 regions... that I leave up to the experts. or better bullshit artists.
Does that make sense to anyone?
Re:Translation (Score:1)
The next stratagey they use is to increace the combination of bianary digits that a wave can represent. Instead of letting a peak/trough represent a bianry 1/0, they use a "bullseye" to let the peak/trough send multiple bits.
Since
0 volts amplitude and 0 degrees of phase shift would be binary 0000
.1v and 0d is 0001b
.2v and 0d is 0010b
.1v and 1d is 0011b
to help visualize this think about each wave as a seperate entity and not part of the carrier and then place the voltages and phases on a sheet of graph paper.
By allowing each wave to represent a byte/word vice a single bit, you pump up the datarate. This is why we refer to modems in kb/s and not baud anymore.
If this is what they are doing, they are just modifying the current algorithms that everyone uses for standard modems.
I don't buy it (Score:1)
The amount of information that you can transmit through a channel is dictated by the Shannon limit:
D B * log2(SNR + 1)
Where D is the data rate in bits per second, B is the bandwidth in Hz and SNR is the signal to noise ratio of the channel (assuming Gaussian noise). In order to get 90 bps/Hz, you would need a channel SNR of over 270 decibels! Exponentials are ugly that way. For those not in the know, that's HUGE.
There's no avoiding noise in commuications channels: thermal noise abounds and in a radio link is not going to go below the 3 Kelvin cosmic microwave background radiation (in completely empty space). In order to get the 270dB signal to noise ratio with a 3 Kelvin noise floor, you would have to transmit with 42 kilowatts of power per Hertz of bandwidth. The whole thing doesn't seem very efficient to me. To compare, at 14 bps/Hz you can get away with an SNR of about 42dB, which would only require you to transmit about 10^-17 watts of power per Hz to compete with the cosmic microwave background.
Of course in a real application, your noise floor will be much more than the 3 Kelvin CMBR...
Re:how they do that? (Score:1)
Re:Shadiness in the spectral bandwidth claims. (Score:2)
My point was that this filtering would lose information. Your available bandwidth influences how fine and how fast a phase shift you can detect.
Good question, though.
Re:Shadiness in the spectral bandwidth claims. (Score:1)
I understand that nudging the duty-cycle would cause spreading in the frequency domain (at least, I think I do) but didn't the article say that the signal is then run through some narrow bandpass filters or something? So then wouldn't the nudging sort of degrade to a phase shift or something? Oh, man...freakin' electronical things, hurtin' my brainez.
jeb.
Re:Phone lines will stick around longer yet. (Score:1)
Dumb Q: How much wireless can we stand? (Score:1)
How much wireless stuff can be crammed into a given volume of physical space before the crosstalk and interference disrupts everything?
I visualize the problem as this: radio is really just another form of light, so each wireless device is the electromagnetic equivelent of a 3-watt light bulb. The color of the light is its frequency (or "channel", if you prefer.)
Imagine the average suburban neighborhood, but where all the houses are made of glass (to allow the light metaphor to work - radio passes through walls) Each house now has a couple of thousand of these colored lights stuck in it (all my appliences, etc. are networked), shining all over the place. The neighbourhood is awash in light! How are these devices supposed to function in this kind of environment?
How well does the aether scale?
And then something magic happens... (Score:3)
We can write the modulated signal as
v(t) = A * exp(j * m * (d(t) - 0.5))
where d(t) is a binary data signal. If m=Pi/2 then we have a BPSK style modulation. Make m small and we get a VMSK signal. This small value of m is what gives them a proportionally smaller occupation of the spectrum for the bit rate.
NoW consider the constellation of this modulation in the complex plane, we have two points representing the bits 0 and 1. For BPSK they are seperated by Pi radians, while with VMSK they are much closer together. VMSK is therefore clearly more vunerable to noise than a BPSK scheme. At the above website they clearly state that the noise resistance (C/I) is significantly better with VMSK!!!
It seems clear that there is a basic fault in their reasoning, and they can't beat Shannon in this manner. D.
Re:Woo hoo. (Score:1)
Sure you do. Cellphones broadcast relatively strong FM signals, so why can't laptops? Of course it would require a complex network of antennas (perhaps use existing cell towers?).
=================================
re: FM radio bandwidth (Score:1)
FM radio has a 200 kHz bandwidth. You need some seperation between channels so assume that each FM channel has a useable bandwidth of 150 kHz (as per the article). As for FM audio it only uses about 56 kHz. There is a subband of about 20 kHz that most FM stations lease out to transmit things like shopping mail music. There is a whole lot more bandwidth, but today's FM stations are not equipped to use it.
FM stereo uses 0 to 18 kHz for Left+Right, has a stereo pilot signal at 19 kHz, and has Left-Right centered around 38 kHz (20 to 56 kHz). I believe the Left-Right audio is double sideband modulated and the stereo pilot signal is frequency doubled to be used as its carrier. I can't remember where the subband is, but it somewhere above 56 kHz. I believe that the subband is either AM or double side band modulated (ie AM carrier surpressed). Yes the FM radio spec wastes a lot of bandwidth.
This is all from memory. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Re:Range? (Score:1)
Great idea, but due to the possibility of someone intercepting the data, you'd have the RIAA on your ass
Could this be deployed in a car-to-car fashion?
Again, an interesting idea to most (including myself), but probably not to the RIAA. Incidentally, will this be a "tune-in-and-listen-to-what-I'm-listening-to" sort of thing or will it be a "listen-to-whatever-I-have-that-you-want" sort of thing? The second one could get rather complicated, especially with the driver trying to simultaneously drive and page through a list of MP3s trying to decide which one to listen to. It's hard enough trying to find a radio station to listen to
=================================
What signal-to-noise ratio does this require? (Score:2)
The information-carrying capacity (C) of a channel is a function of its bandwidth B and signal (S) to noise (N) ratio. The formula (this is elementary information theory) is
C=B log2(1+S/N)
We can plug in the given values for B (200 KHz) and C (12.8M bit/sec) and determine the required signal to noise ratio:
12.8e6=2e5 log2(1+S/N)
log2(1+S/N)=64
S/N=2^64 - 1
Each bit of signal-to-noise ratio corresponds to 3 decibels (6 dB if you're talking about power, which I won't, just to be charitable), so the required S/N ratio is around 190 dB.
Is this achievable? In a word, no. It's not even close. They're off by more than 100 dB.
When these guys claim that `when properly implemented and used under the right conditions, the digital modulation scheme reportedly delivers 90 bps/Hz-over the air' they're blowing smoke. They're saying they need a 270 dB S/N ratio. (That's larger than my number because I gave them some extra slack.) If they could get it, their scheme would work, but they can't, so it won't.
Won't catch on in mainstream industry... (Score:1)
I doubt it will take off.
Seems shady? (Score:1)
-d
Ummm, ever heard of dopler RADAR? (Score:1)
Re:Impossible to implement (Score:1)
70 dBW is 70dB above 1 W = 10kW.
I think the math is OK
Re:Impossible to implement (Score:1)
There's clearly something wrong here (see amusing calculations below). So, we go look at their web page. Wait a minute! Their pictures [vmsknetwork.com] use square waves, not sine waves. They're actually broadcasting on all frequencies, and are misrepresenting their bandwidth. Problem solved. The real data rates may be what they claim -- they just use way more bandwidth than they claim.
The critical test, which they do not report, is to send and receive data through a narrow bandpass filter that eliminates the high-frequency components of the square-wave signal.
Amusing calculations:
The photon shot noise of a 1W, 100 MHz signal implies a maximum SNR of about 10^12.
SNR = Sqrt[Power/h*BW], h=6*10^-34 SI
A more reasonable microwatt radio signal has a maximum SNR of 10^9 and, with 100 MHz bandwidth, a throughput limit of 6 Mbps.
To get the SNR of 10^27 they claim as maximum (see below) you'd need a star-powered transmitter. And our sun probably isn't big enough.
To get a SNR of 10^19 you need something like 10^13 watts of receiver power. A nuclear plant wouldn't work. So, clearly either we've misinterpreted the research, they're full of crap, or they're on to something new.
Their archive. (Score:1)
Re:in case you hadn't noticed (Score:1)
as an executive member of my college radio station, I'd argue the fact that there isn't any good music. If anything, there is MORE good music now than ever before. Thanks to technology and decreasing costs of really good equipment, almost everyone can make an album that sounds as good as one produced by WB or the other major labels.
Therefor, the question isn't that there isn't good music, just that no commerical top 20(which all commercial radio stations are now, by the way...) radio station is willing to play them. They are only willing to play something "safe," something that falls clearly within the genre, something that sounds similiar to another band that has proven sucessful.
If you want to hear the good music, now you have to turn to college radio. One I would suggest is the U of Minnesota's Radio K--they broadcast via realaudio, and you can check them out here [umn.edu]
mike kohout
Re:Impossible to implement (Score:1)
> 70 dBW is 70dB above 1 W = 10kW.
Gee, where was I when I wrote that ?
Yes, 70dBm is 10kW, but it only makes the case more clear. By using VMSK/2 modulation you use a lot of power to conserve bandwidth. This can be advantageous in some situations, but clearly *not* when you need high baud rates
Re:Compressed more than John Candy's seat cushion. (Score:2)
Yeah, I didn't count that, since it's not actually carrying data. In fact, the FCC doesn't like to license stations less than 500kHz apart. 'Course, New York and L.A. are big markets...
Stereo pilot is at 19khz if i'm not terribly mistaken.Yeah... I've been thinking more of MTS stereo on TV, which is basically just the same thing as FM stereo with a different pilot frequency.
All frequencies higher than 18khz or so are filtered out(so that they don't mess with stereo carrier). 40khz bandwidth is a good estimate..Well, remember, they're not filtered out, they're modulated into the additive and difference signals. The (L+R) signal that you hear on a mono FM radio, then the pilot which turns on the FM stereo circuits, then the (L-R) difference signal which is used to create the stereo image. All that space is available under such a scheme.
Increased bandwidth does have a bigger impact, however. Would probably want to use frequency bands over 1ghz where a bandwidth of 500khz-1mhz is obtainable..Why, when you can basically run a dozen 56k modems slingshotted through the same given bandwidth? Use the bandwidth efficiently, and you don't actually need the 500-1,000kHz bandwidth.
Besides, UHF/microwave sucks. It's way too position dependant. I don't want a Walkman that has to be moved three feet to the left before I'm able to receive the Howard Stern show again. Since UHF/microwave tend to bounce off lots of things, reflections and self-cancelling signals are going to be a constant pain in the ass.
And not just bandwidth (Score:1)
VMSK/2 Promisses 5 Times More Bandwidth
...And 50% more "s"s.
Sounds good in Theory, but in practice? (Score:1)
A second thing that I was concerned with is how much would interference affect these signals. The article mentions interference should be low since it is such a narrow channel. I was thinking of a weak signal and how would it affect the data. Would the loss of data make the signal unusable. Plus in areas where overlapping stations on the same frequency, how would the data react.
It seems like they are testing this cellular communications and given the authors thoughts on the problems of FM and AM interference, it looks like they plan to use this with cellular service. Maybe radio from your cell phone? It looks this will be a pay service to subscribe, like radio cable. I wonder if it will catch on any faster than that?
in case you hadn't noticed (Score:2)
MTV stopped playing music years ago because there simply isn't enough good music to fill the airwaves. Britney Spears, N'Sync, and everyone else that will be on the FOX Teen Choice Awards tonight are proof that there is something wrong. Regardless of what percentage they make up in the general population, teenage girls seem to have a HUGE influence on the music that is chosen to be "popular". Popular music hasn't appealed to the masses in decades.
You can have all the bandwidth in the world -- if nobody's interested in what's on, it's all a big waste of time.
--
Even more bandwidth (Score:1)
Compressed more than John Candy's seat cushion. (Score:4)
Well, the bandwidth of an ordinary PSTN telephone line (not DSL!) is only from about 300Hz to about 3kHz. And in that bandwidth, the practical transmission limit, the current state of the art, seems to be stuck at 56k.
You can't stream a 128kbps MP3 at 56kbps. Not in real time, as radio implies.
What's the bandwidth of a conventional FM radio station? 20kHz or so carrier deviation for mono. To light up the stereo light, the stereo pilot must be found, and that runs at about 21kHz carrier deviation, if I recall. A full FM stereo signal takes a carrier wave an modulates it about 44kHz either way, so 40kHz bandwidth is probably a practical conservative estimate and has easy enough numbers to work around.
Since a 56k modem uses quadrature amplitude modulation on ?4? simultaneous carriers in a total bandwidth of 2.7kHz (3000Hz top end - 300 Hz bottom end), then how many carriers could you stuff into a 40kHz wide data channel?
I think it's exponentially more.
This sounds very exciting.
how they do that? (Score:2)
Shannon worse than Gates (Score:3)
We need more scientists like Moore, who ensured that chips would continue to get faster and cheaper, and they have. That's progress. That's a good guy.
All Shannon, Nyquist, and Einstein have done is limit the rates of communication we can attain and bloat our harddrives with 2F-sampled signals (Mp3z, pr0n). What jerks. Much worse than Gates.
jeb
Wireless Internet Radio/TV (Score:1)
With the broadband that is starting to roll out, houses with fibre or other broadband technologies would be able to use it as the connection, or for people out in the middle of nowhere they could use the wireless technology. Car radios would be internet clients that connect to all the radio stations, TV's would also do the same thing for TV broadcasts, etc.
I don't know if the bandwidth would be able to handle all of this, but if you could have 100 streams over each frequency I think we'd be okay, especially if they were low power which would allow the frequencies to be used over and over again within a certain distance. I'm sure someone out there will be able to figure it out.
Re:90 bits per second per Hz? (Score:1)
Problems with mobile applications? (Score:3)
VMSK/2 seems to be mostly an academic modulation right now- they need to send it through much more rigorous testing in the real world, with real world components.
I'm skeptical when people talk about overturning Shannon's limit- people would love to disprove it, but it holds up time and time again.
Re:Compressed more than John Candy's seat cushion. (Score:3)
Transmission rate is still dependant on the information theory(bandwidth and the more power you put out, the better transmission rates you can expect, square power and rate doubles, double bandwidth and rate doubles). Could still improve the transmission rate of telephone line by improving the s/n-ratio(putting out more power) but benefits would be small compared to the cost..
FM-broadcasts are much more powerful than your average telephone conversation and s/n-ratio could be made better thus improving transmission rates. Increased bandwidth does have a bigger impact, however. Would probably want to use frequency bands over 1ghz where a bandwidth of 500khz-1mhz is obtainable..
You can stuff as many carriers you want into a bandwidth but limiting factor is going to be the modulating frequency which is going to appear on the both sides of the carrier(could suppress one). you don't want interference..
Re:90 bits per second per Hz? (Score:1)
Re:in case you hadn't noticed (Score:1)
I See a Bad Trend Forming (Score:3)
With this technology, boasting that they could deliver 100 128Kbps MP3 channels probably means that they are probably planning on doing such a thing, maybe even squeezing the compression a little more to get a few more channels out of it.
While this is all great from a technological standpoint (and probably a business one at that), I see a trend of lower quality broadcasting coming about. While I understand that radio transmission is typically less than perfect (static, power wires, etc), digital artifacts of compression come through even on the clearest of signals. And on a side note, with digital cable, sometimes it almost looks like I'm watching a video screen with an 8-bit color depth.
I guess my rant is that the people on the delivery side of television and radio are letting their quality standards decrease. They can pack more content into the wires/airwaves by using compression, and this leads to lower quality decoded signals. For the average person, this is not an issue (and you're probably smirking right now). For the audiophile, this is quite a disturbing trend.
My two cents; no refunds.
--
Re:Sounds good in Theory, but in practice? (Score:1)
That's why we still broadcast TV as chroma/luma, so all the old 1950's B&W units still work. It's the same reason FM stereo is transmitted L+R plus a 1/2 frequency impulse for an additional L-R (or R-L) component. Just filter below the stereo impulse and you get mono for all non-stereo FM receivers.
--
10Brett-T
Digital broadcast radio? (Score:2)
I guess that's how the whole dang human comedy keeps perpetuating itself. ok bye.
Axel
Re:Problems with mobile applications? (Score:1)
Alphacom Communication is a multilevel marketing (Score:3)
Typically ML organisations are more interested
in building a network of "sales" agents and
taking their money than in delivering anything
like they promise.
Be skeptical.
See Alphacom Corporate page [networkalpha.com]
for their spin.
Re:Woo hoo. (Score:1)
Impossible to implement (Score:4)
Do the math:
Shannon's channel capacity theorem:
C= B * log2 ( 1 + SNR )
C = capacity in bps
B = bandwidth
SNR = signal to noise ratio
Solving for SNR in dB ( = 10*log10(SNR) ) gives:
SNR_db = 10 * log10 (( 2 ^ (C/B)) - 1)
With C = 12.8 Mbit/s and B = 200 kHz you get SNR = 192 dB !
To have a SNR = 192 dB, the signal has to be 1.8 * 10^19 times stronger than the noise ! A receiver with 200kHz bandwidth will typically have a noise floor at -120 dBm, so you need more than 70 dBm received signal strength. 70 dBm is 10 W !! And that is the signal strength at the receiving antenna, so the transmitter would have to be in the gigawatt range, to reach short distances.
This means that VMSK/2 can be used, but you can't reach 12.8 Mbit/s without a nuclear powered transmitter. You can get a decent bit rate with VMSK/2 on battery powered equipment, but you have to design for a few kbit/s, not 12.8 Mbit/s. Nice theory, but
Re:Range? (Score:1)
Re:I don't buy it (Score:1)
Receiver Sensitivity (dBm) = Required C/I (dB) + Implementation Loss (dB) + KT (dBm/Hz) + 10log(Bandwidth Hz) + Receiver Noise Figure (dB)
Just the KT term from Boltzmanns constant gives you a value of -174dBm/Hz. Assuming their 10KHz bandwidth, required C/I of 4.9dB as they state at their website and ignoring implementation losses and receiever impartments, we therefore have an ideal receiever sensivity of -129.1dBm. After taking into account losses in filters before the LNA and implementation loss and the noise figure of the receiver is is more likely to be -120dBm.
Taking your 270dB S/N gives a received power requirement of 150dBm. Take a path loss from the receiver to transmit of a very lower 30dB and we need to transmit 180dbm or 1e15 watts of RF!!!! Star wars eat your heart out!!!!
D.
Re:Redshifting radio? (Score:1)
Re:I See a Bad Trend Forming (Score:1)
I think this is one of those few cases where I acually wish I were 'happily dumb'.
Re:Doubtful (Score:1)
It can't possibly be true, they got their math wrong for sure.
Re:I See a Bad Trend Forming (Score:2)
I agree completely. I prefer a Betacam or 3/4" professional videotape, and failing that a good home Beta machine or analog cable feed.
The Beta machines don't screw up the chrominance quite the same way even the best modern VHS machines do, and neither one of them has the jerky and artificial rendering of a DVD.
Note that the DVD has *not* been embraced as a professional format: most TV stations are shipping around digital Betacam (almost no compression), analog Betacam/Betacam SP, or burning their own analog video discs.
Now, with MP3s so out in the open, people are embracing 128Kbps MP3s as "CD quality". Personally, I think this is a statement made by someone who is no where near the category of Audiophile.Okay. Here's a bit of an issue.
I worked for years as a professional sound technician. I've done sound for Garth Brooks, Harry Belafonte and the Three Tenors.
I've had self-proclaimed audiophiles (who double as lawyers and dentists during the day) ask my why it is that I don't have Monster Cable connecting my stack of Crown amplifiers to the TurboSound bins suspended from the stadium roof. Or, why I don't use vinyl. Or why I don't use sonic CD stabilizers (the green rings) or other similar crap that people who don't know anything like to use.
Now, not knowing whether or not to class you as that kind of audiophile, or the kind I am, I will defend the MP3 this way: they do sound pretty damned good when they get above 160kbps. In fact, I can't consistantly tell them apart, above 160kbps.
But, I agree, the majority of people seem to think that the 128kbps MP3 is CD-quality. I'd suggest that the 160kbps MP3 is indistinguishable from CD-quality. But remember, you do live in a world that has embraced VHS over Beta, and where people still buy pre-recorded 1-7/8IPS cassette tapes. Quality is not what people want.
As for me, I really want to do some more R/D on my old SoundBlaster 16. I'd love to be able to get the D/A converters out of the RF field inside the computer's case. (I've already managed to extricate the analog buffer amplifiers.) Newer sound cards are very hard to hack this way.
My listening setup is a pair of Acoustic Research AR-4s connected to a Sound A-5000 solid-state amplifier. The preamp stages of the Sound A-5000 have been replaced with a 12AT7 preamp board that I designed. Surface-mounted, ground-plane, fine quality components, DC heaters for the tubes, etc. S/N over 98dB on the amplifier. THD is less than my equipment can measure. And, as any real audiophile knows, the only thing on par with a pair of AR-4s is a pair of Celestion Ditton 44s.
<grin>
Re:Sounds good in Theory, but in practice? (Score:1)
Re:Shannon worse than Gates (Score:1)
jeb.
Laws are Made to be Broken (Score:1)
Physicists are showing it may be possible to send some information faster than the speed of light, which is impossible, mathematically proven I believe.
An old "law" of physics says that it's impossible to set up magnets passively, with no outside supports, that levitate. Recently, scientists unveiled a magnetic bearing that does just this.
Didn't engineers say it was physically impossible to have a feature size of less than something like twice what we are using now? Granted, that wasn't a mathematical proof, but they seemed pretty confident about it.
When Einstein was working on relativity, I'm sure people thought of all this dilation of time as being mathematically impossible, though I don't know what proof that would be violating.
Quantum physics is chock-full of logical impossibilities.
The point is, sometimes there are non-obvious ways to circumvent "laws" of nature. I'm not saying Alphacom has done this or anything, I'm just saying that we shouldn't brush off the possibility by saying that it would violate Shannon's law if they did.
jeb
Implementation? (Score:1)
Woo hoo. (Score:2)
Because No one really "owns" the airwaves, like one does a cable, you could get a lot of competition amongst providers for customers.
I can see the Laptop/Handheld owners screaming now. I have a palm, and the thought of cheap high bandwidth wireless access for it amuses me.
VMSK/2 vs. QAM (Score:2)
The implementation of VMSK/2, however, is significantly simpler. VMSK/2 can be implemented with an extremely low gate count without quadrature A/D converters, complex digital signal processing and equalization. So if its performance is not too suboptimal it might still be interesting. It would have been much more interesting 10 years ago, though. Today you can put half a million transistors on a chip without blinking.
----
Re:Operative Word (Score:1)
--
Digital Radio (Score:1)
Re:Implementation? (Score:1)
(Note - I happen to work for Ibiquity, so do some searches and feel free to come to your own conclusion.)
A man destined to have no karma,
Mike
Re:Digital Radio (Score:1)
As an avid ham, I've been watching each new commercial wireless application drool over expanded frequency space. Having the ability to expand the efficiency of existing allocations seems like a godsend.
Tis a shame it's already patented - open source radio, anyone?
*scoove*
Haiku? (Score:1)
Higher bandwidth radio
Shortwave Pirates Smile
--
Re:Compressed more than John Candy's seat cushion. (Score:1)
I don't know about where you come from, but I was taught (by my father, and ex Telco engineer) PSTN has a bandwidth of 300 to 3300Hz, a total of 3KHz.
As for 56k being the limit on that, not really true. That Eris' apple of bandwidth is only achieved by taking advantage of the fact telephone networks are digital to "the last mile".
They use the 64Kbps channel as 8KHz x 7bits (they drop the lower bit for signalling and other reasons, aparently). Oh, look! 8KHz! But didn't we say 3KHz bandwidth? They're taking advantage of the fact PSTN aint what it used to be.
Yeh, I know. This isn't really on topic for VMSK/2 (which looks interesting, but time will tell), but I hate to see disinformation. (o8
That sounds great. (Score:1)
Founder's Camp [founderscamp.com]
MS VMS? (Score:4)
Re:SCAM (Score:1)
Very Minimal Shift Key
Heres [alphacomopportunity.com] the link to the "technical information." I still don't think it's anything but a scam. It reeks of it, just look at the ads and scrolling text.
My shift key is small enough. :P
Skreech
Operative Word (Score:2)
I bet this is vapor ware and nothing will ever come of it.
___________________
Practice (Score:1)
Doubtful (Score:4)
Author(s):
Koukourlis, C.S.
Pliatsikas, J.C.
Sahalos, J.N.
Walker, H.R.
Title:
Spectrally efficient biphase modulation FOUND IN:
Applied Microwave and Wireless v 10 n 4 May 1998. p 74, 76-81
Publ. year:
1998
Abstract:
Phase modulated biphase codes which are transmitted single sideband-suppressed carrier at RF frequencies require much less bandwidth without any significant increase in circuit complexity. These codes have an important advantage over other bandwidth efficient modulation methods in that they do not lose bit energy with increasing bandwidth efficiency (compression). Actual measurements confirm this characteristic. 10 Refs.
Re:MS VMS? (Score:1)
--
No Free Lunch? (Score:1)
Only a certain bit rate,
My pr0n remains slow.
Shadiness in the spectral bandwidth claims. (Score:3)
You can think of VMSK/2 as a form of duty-cycle modulation (Figure 1). Think of a "square" wave whose total period does not vary but which, depending on whether a given bit interval contains a 1 or a 0, spends slightly more or slightly less than half the period in the high state.
Problem - this kind of nudging of the duty cycle causes spreading in the frequency domain. In fact, it is these additional frequencies that encode the change in the duty cycle.
If you try to transmit a signal modulated using this technique through a very narrow channel centered about the carrier frequency, you will lose a lot of the duty cycle information, and your data signal will degrade a *lot*.
I am skeptical of this getting much more effective use of bandwidth than conventional encoding schemes. The best I can see them getting is a modest gain if this technique is less sensitive to common types of noise (which has yet to be demonstrated).
Re:Woo hoo. (Score:1)
The trouble with the Palm is that you'll still have to get your data compressed at Palm.Net or something like it. I've used a VII and it can be ridiculously slow. Like 5 minutes to download 2k (which had been compressed).
Unfortunately wireless apps over any distance are so slow that they're barely usable. The Palm VII only gets 8Kb/s.
Re:Translation (Score:2)
The main thing that I picked up on was the sheer lack of spacing between the transitions of the final data and the original clock. As I read it, this means that the clock recovery circuitry is going to have to be spot on every single cycle.
Admittedly things may well have changed since I last saw them, but PLLs were notoriously unstable when I played with them. I wonder how they're going to make the receivers sufficiently portable to make this worthwhile in a mobile situation.
What we probably need is the original StrongARM design crew from DEC and give them something like a DSP32 to play with
Re:Translation (Score:1)
90 bits per second per Hz? (Score:1)
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Hz mean "per second". Does this mean that we now have 90 bits per second per second? After 1 second, 90 bits transferred, after 2 seconds 360 bits... Wow, this could be big.
If this is 5 times the bandwidth... (Score:1)
Re:how they do that? (Score:5)
There are a myriad of modulation schemes (and related coding schemes) for achieving spectral efficiency. Basically, beyond the simple stuff (filter off the extra sideband, use phase AND amplitude), they achieve that efficiency by encoding data in more subtle aspects of the signal (read: more noise sensitive). This VMSK/2 scheme appears to be one which generates smaller sidebands by modulating the signal less. As such, it requires higher power to achieve it's spectral efficienty (ignore the claims of lower power - that's *per carrier* in the signal, but they use more carriers).
Note also that increased spectral efficiency is only part of the issue. In the modern cellular world, you need increased efficiency in terms of bits per Hz per square kilometer (i.e. you share the frequencies over an area). A requirement for higher power (which really means a requirement for higher signal-to-noise ratio) reduces the areal sharing that you can achieve.
Ultimately, you can't beat Shannon's laws. If you can, you can also make perpetual motion machines and free energy (yeah, it's a stretch, but the connection is there).
Since this company is selling multilevel marketing, I am more than a bit suspicious of any claims. Multilevel marketing schemes are too often fraudulent and based on overblown claims. I am not saying these guys are wrong, just that their approach is suspicious.
As far as comments on here on FM signal bandwidth... FM stations use a 200kHz wide channel. A stereo signal uses a composite of simple FM for the Left+Right signal, and a subcarrier at 42kHz carrying Left-Right. There is still room left in the spectrum for an additional subcarrier (or more) - which is where you find service such as Muzak. Plain old FM mono is a *spread-spectrum* modulation scheme, in that the RF signal is occupies significantly more bandwidth than the modulating signal.
Re:Woo hoo. (Score:1)
What is VMFK/2 [castleen.com]?
Re:Translation (Score:1)
Most of the article explained how different this transmission mode was from the standard we use now. Electromagnetics is a really complex and interesting field...
I can't get to the article (where I'm working this week has a weird proxy set up) but I'm curious -- are they proposing moving closer to what Shannon says the link is capable of, or are they trying to break it?
This is nothing against the "Haenel-Handy" hoax... (Score:1)
The first time I saw this on TV I did not know whether I should burst in laugh about their stupidity or start to cry about what happened to Germany. However, there is one thing for sure: If I was in the recruitment section of a big company I would hire these guys at once. I suspect the value of such people for marketing purposes is vitally unlimited.
SCAM (Score:2)
Notice how on the page they don't even mention what VMSK means? They do on their business scam site: http://www.alphacomopportunity.com/cgi-bin/d.cgi/
If you go to their page you see they avoid discussing their technology and talk all about their business plans.
I'm surprised these guys aren't advertising snake oil or $4000 a month work at home jobs in the newspapers. Don't be fooled they are scam artists.
I also saw on www.indexdirect.com/classifieds this advertisement:
Business Opportunities
FOR SALE Increase your current internet connection
Posted on: 2000-08-11 .
Details:
Increase your current internet connection by thirty times it's current speed! FREE for 5 days Become a distributor (under 10 bucks) Check out the VMSK technology!! Have a GREAT day
Email : carters@polbox.com
Contact: Shelby Carter
Website: http://www.alphacomopportunity.com/cgi-bin/d.cgi/
128k mp3 sucks (Score:1)
Re:in case you hadn't noticed (Score:1)
Re:Translation (Score:3)
No, they are actually doing the opposite from that: instead of multiple bits/symbol, they are using one bit/symbol. The bit is initially encoded by a change in duty cycle of a square(-ish) wave. They then modulate a carrier with this signal, remove the carrier and a sideband, finally filtering the resulting sideband with extremely sharp, patented-technology filters.
I'm real suspicious... the initial square wave would have to be several MHz, and it seems that the subsequent processing would either wind up stripping out the information or result in a multi-MHz bandwidth in the resulting signal. I could be all wrong, but until I saw the math that shows exactly how the bits are encoded and extracted, I'd be skeptical.
Re:Sounds good in Theory, but in practice? (Score:1)
I would imagine that some type of addressing would be used. While the reciever might not be able to send a specific IP address nor would the broadcast station want to send out thousands of channels for every user, but they can still embed a source address in every packet. So you might not tune your radio by frequency like we do now. Mabey by name, like "NYCRocks" or something like that. Then your reciever would only open packets from that sender.
I have no idea if this is what they plan to do, but it seems like one logical solution. The downside to this type of broadcast is that with it being digital, it could easily become a pay for use system, with only paying subscribers reaping the benefits of such a system. It does promise to save a lot of frequency bandwith however, and if this ever became mainstream, we can all benefit from that.
Re:Doubtful (Score:1)
Re:Redshifting radio? (Score:2)
Sorry, *absolutely* correct in its application. The only sort of police "radar" that uses timing to determine distance is a laser radar gun. The traditional RF police speed radar (known as Doppler radar) mixes a sample of the outgoing signal with a received signal and makes a beat between the two. Generally this beat is in the audio frequency range. By beating the outgoing with the incoming it doesn't really matter how much your main oscillator drifts, because over the microsecond or so that the signal takes to make a round trip it won't have drifted far. This sort of radar (as I have described it) can't distinguish between incoming and outgoing targets, but there are DSP based police doppler radars that have this ability, with a different downconversion technique.
Time to go back to basic physics- for a speed much less than c the doppler shift of a signal will be a factor of 1/(1 +/- (v/c)) where v is the radial velocity to or from the observer (- when approaching the observer, + when going away).
For example, with a radar operating at 18GHz, the doppler shift of a car moving at 100 ft/s is about 1.85 kHz. Check out this page [mathpages.com] for more information on doppler. Things do change as you approach the speed of light, but doppler still does matter, and I think it matters in this situation because of the extreme timing accuracy that this modulation requires. If the timing accuracy goes down, so will the bit-rate.
Re:90 bits per second per Hz? (Score:1)
VMSK/2 isn't too far feteched (Score:1)
Increasing the symbol rate is not hard to understand. The ideas aren't crazy, it's just a tough idea to implement.
Like the idea of a fusion powerplant, the idea is fine, but making it happen is another issue.
The hard tech will be needed in the receivers. Making extremely narrowband filters isn't easy and from what I read, the patents are all locked up. Operating at current FM & TV frequencies lead to all kinds of multipath issues that can be solved, but add more to the reciever to deal with.
Look for impressive demos where the receiver is the size of refrigerator. Sizing down the technology to fit in a dashboard and cost $20 bucks a unit will be a real challenge. Much money will be sunk in attempting to make these systems small and rugged.
A better use might be in high end transmission systems. One transponder on a satellite give me 36MHz of bandwidth. Split the bird between two sites for duplex operation and imagine the amount of data I can squirt around the world. Satellite costs are already less than fiber rates for the amount of data they can pass. If you do the rough math you are talking about 3.24GIGAbits of transfer. What OC- is that?
It's been a while since Linear Systems & Communincation Theory, but I don't doubt the Shannon limit can be adapted to this keying system. I'll leave it to a comm theory expert to comment.
Shannon's Law (Score:2)
This whole topic is some combination of genuinely good technology, hype, exaggerations by imperfect journalists, and fraud. From where I'm sitting, I don't know which of the above causes is the true explanation. But I doubt Shannon's law has been repealed. Alas...
Re:I See a Bad Trend Forming (Score:2)
That just means it's time to get out the big book on electrical engineering and the soldering iron...
Older, good-quality stereo equipment is a good place to start. Tubes can be good, but while I like tubes for preamps, you want to keep them away from vibration (microphonics); either way, I recommend a good solid state output stage, because tubes are high-impedance devices, they drive speakers through output transformers, and they're neat inductive devices which cause all sorts of equally neat inductive effects in your frequency response and THD plots. MOSFET amps are really nice since they have a very low output impedance, but if the amplifier isn't very heavy, it probably doesn't have a power transformer to match the current that it should be able to drive. Every three watts of rated power should weigh about 1 pound. Therefore, if the amp says it's 100 watts and weighs 10 pouds, it's probably not really capable of doing 100 watts.
Car stereos and computer speakers aren't rated in watts. They're rated in "w", the official unit for "wishful thinking".
Heat your soldering iron up and replace all the potentiometers, all the resistors, all the capacitors, all the switches. Get yourself some nice Sovtek, Mullard or vintage American tubes at a music store or order them from Antique Electronics Supply in Tempe AZ. Find new low-noise versions of the transistors in your amp's output stage. It's cheap, takes only a few bucks and a few hours of your time, and you can put together a great system for very little money.
Oh yeah, and if the old stereo you choose to hack is *too* perfect, don't do it. Some of these amps have collector value or fan clubs that would want to see a good one preserved . Usually, a beater that doesn't work will work after replaceing the stuff I listed above.
Speakers? I run AR-4s; I'd also run anything else Acoustic Research made in the 1970s. Anything Celestion, anything Klipsche, anything vintage Bose...
I go digital to my amp (I still need a good noise gate though)and I find that MP3s at the fixed 128Kb rate have some serious digital artifacts,Oh yeah. They're great as background music. In the car, for example, you'd never hear the noise over the sound of the car. But I can barely stand to listen to 128kbps in my listening room.
And ya know, the digital artifacts are somehow more objectionable than the tape hiss or turntable ruble of days gone by. I guess it's just that the noise that compression introduces has no soothing natural equivalent... at least tape hiss can sound like something comforting and normal, like a waterfall or a leaking barbeque tank...
Now if I could only get a motherboard that didn't introduce it's own digital noise into the mix I'd be happy, but alas I am poor.Just remember that, as long as the status of logic lines isn't changed (ie. 1 stays 1, 0 stays 0) as the data enters the digital to analog converter, you're clear. Digitally introduced noise would cause all sorts of other things, since it wouldn't just affect stuff going to your D/A converter - it would affect the contents of your computer's data and address buses, too: you'd be lucky to even get a BSoD, let alone audio that still played.
Any noise will be picked up in the analog stages. So, keep the analog stages as far as possible from the digital stages. Use chokes, bypass capacitors and large filters on the power feeding the resistor ladder in the D/A stage and the output buffers that follow. Keep the analog section physically away from the digital section, and keep the analog and digital sides independantly shielded to a good, strong ground.
It could be done with existing stuff... anyone got a schematic for a first generation SoundBlaster 16? (Older cards look easier to hack since they're less integrated.)
Re:Woo hoo. (Score:2)
Ryan
Translation (Score:2)
Re:90 bits per second per Hz? (Score:2)
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Hz mean "per second". Does this mean that we now have 90 bits per second per second?
The author is using a shorthand reference to Hz of bandwidth.
Shannons Law (Score:2)
Secondly, the article gives _no_ information that Shannons law has been broken.
In fact, it hasn't. All Shannons law says is the relationship between the signal to noise ration, and the size of the channel, to how much data you can put through it.
In this case, Shannons law allows this to happen. But requires powers of something like (quick mental sums) 280dB.
That's, like, stupidly high.
Probably not at all; it sounds fake. (Score:2)
It's possible that EDN got this all wrong, and someone has actually found an end-run around a whole lot of difficult stuff in conventional signalling theory. But I wouldn't bet on it, and if you're smart, you won't either. This may be some scheme to get investment money out of a bunch of suckers, and it behooves you to not be one of them.
--
Range? (Score:2)
No. (Score:2)
Your post should be moderated as
-1, offtoppic
-1, trolle
-1, flambat
or, to save karma from meta-moderation, -1, undderrrattedd
Have a nice day. ^_^