Teaching digital communications: a DSP approach

Modem digital communications are DSP based. We present a DSP-based digital communications lab. Although based on very simple hardware, we try to show that most practical situations that we can find in the design of digital communication systems can be reproduced in our setting. The main idea in our approach is to give the same importance to discrete-time and continuous-time communication signals. Looking for student motivation, the lab is based on a problem solving approach making the students develop from simple to more complex communications systems from the very beginning. It needs very simple equipment already known to the students, so most of the time is devoted to digital communications work, and it is low cost. Personal and team work is combined in the lab, pursuing student motivation.