The Berkeley Communication Laboratory

The Berkeley Communication Laboratory consists of a number of stand-alone work stations, each one containing all necessary experimental equipment for two terms of experiments. By front-panel switching, the work station can be configured into a number of AM, FM, and PCM systems whose parameters can be varied. Waveforms, spectra, and signal-to-noise ratios (SNR's) at various points in these sysfems can be measured. Through use of the work station, the student is able empirically to investigate such concepts as spectral analysis, bandwidth expansion in modulation systems, sampling, aliasing, quantization, bandwidth/SNR tradeoffs, thresholds, etc. The underlying philosophy of the Laboratory, and some results of experiments with the work station are presented in this paper.