Signal impairments

What you will learn:

You'll explore noise, attenuation, distortion, interference, and crosstalk, learning how each affects signal quality and what network designers and engineers do to compensate. The course builds directly on the concepts introduced in PTT's "Analogue and Digital Signals" course.

 

By the end of this course you will be able to:

• explain the cause and effects of noise and loss on information transfer using analogue signals.
• state the formula for expressing loss in decibel units and explain the advantages of using decibel units when comparing power levels.
• give a definition for, and describe the significance of, signal to noise ratio.
• describe the causes, effects and measurement of crosstalk.
• explain the causes and effects of various types of distortion including harmonic distortion and delay distortion.
• list the causes of delay in a network and describe how excessive delay can degrade telephony services and those involved in the transfer of data.
• describe the causes of digital errors including noise, jitter and dispersion.
• define the term Bit Error Ratio (BER) and describe how BER is expressed.
• explain that some types of encoded information are more affected by errors than others.
• explain that a digital signal can tolerate a large reduction in signal to noise ratio before its bit error rate increases.
• explain the concept and significance of noise margin.

 

Course prerequisites:

A basic understanding of electronic signals and electrical circuit theory. It is recommended that the PTT course "Analogue and digital signals" is studied before attempting this course.

 

Approximate study time: 4 hours 

 

Delivery platform requirements:
To access the course, a computer/tablet running a browser such as Chrome, Safari, Edge etc. is required. The device should have an active Internet connection and a screen resolution of at least 1024x768.