ECE459
ECE459 (Communcation Systems) is a 3-credit-hour course that satisfies the Technical Elective requirements for ECE majors. It is offered only in fall semesters.
Content Covered
This course covers analog and (to a lesser extent) digital communications. In the first half of the course, you will learn about amplitude modulated (AM), phase-modulated (PM), and frequency-modulated (FM) communication systems. Topics covered on these modulation schemes include the frequency spectrum, efficiency, modulation from base band, demodulation to base band, and jamming applications. Throughout this course, you will see various familiar topics from ECE210, such as complex numbers, bandwidth and LTI systems. In the middle half of the course, you will learn a little about random processes and apply it to understand what constitutes, in theory, an optimal communication system with respect to measures such as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), probability of error, and power spectrum density. Towards the end of the course you will learn about a few fundamental topics from digital communications, such as the additive white Gaussian noise channel, a variety of digital modulation schemes, and matched filtering.
Prerequisites
The only prerequisite to this course is ECE313, but you should definitely have a good understanding of the material from ECE210 as fourier transforms and convolutions will be used often. You won't really use any probability theory until the second half of the course, in which you deal with topics such as intro-level random processes and signal-to-noise ratio. You will use more probability theory when digital communications topics are covered.
When to Take It
If you are very interested in communication systems, you may be able to take this course at the same time as ECE313 --the topics involving probability in ECE459 are not too complicated and will probably have been covered in ECE313 by the time they are introduced in ECE459. Otherwise, you may take this course after you have completed ECE313. Note that ECE461 (Digital Communications) is not a prerequisite to ECE459 and vice-versa. Another thing to keep in mind is that there is some topical overlap between ECE459, ECE453: Wireless Communication Systems, 463: Digital Communications Laboratory). Compared to ECE461, ECE459's topics are more related to those of ECE453 and 463.
Course Structure
Homework is assigned weekly. Usually these consist of 6 problems from the textbook or problems made up by course staff (in this case, mostly just the instructor). In addition, there are two midterm exams. Usually, these exams will ask you to apply what you know to unfamiliar and non-idealized situations (such as communication channels with attenuation). Some homework problems will ask you to apply concepts in a MATLAB programming assignment, which generally is not long. Overall, the workload is on the light side ranging from 3-10 hours of work on any given week depending on the size of the homework.
Instructors
The primary instructor for this course is Professor Juan Alvarez.
Life After
If you enjoyed this course, you will probably enjoy the communications-area laboratory courses: ECE453 and ECE463. ECE453 deals primarily with RF circuitry and ECE463 involves the implementation of communications components digitally in software (via LabVIEW). If you were interested in the digital communications topics, you should consider taking ECE461 to supplement your knowledge of communications theory. Communication systems often have to deal with stability, so ECE486 is a related technical elective. Also, you should consider taking ECE420 (Digital Signal Processing laboratory) if you want to gain insight on the connection between signal processing and communication systems.