Clark C.L. LabVIEW Digital Signal Processing and Digital Communications

McGraw-Hill, 2005. — 225 p.This is not a book about how to use LabVIEW or even a book on learning digital signal processing (DSP). Instead it is more of a practical guide on how to enable LabVIEW to tackle some real-world DSP and communication problems. This book assumes that the reader has a good grasp of many of the complex issues encountered in DSP and digital communications and also is at least skilled enough in LabVIEW to build a VI. When necessary, the book will dive into the heart of signal processing topics and their implications will be explored. Certain topics will be explained in enough detail so that the reader will know there is no hand waving or mystery involved. This material is meant to bridge the gap between obtaining theoretical knowledge and actually exercising that knowledge. LabVIEW provides us with an excellent set of tools for examining all sorts of DSP and digital communication topics. Its graphical nature allows us to quickly and efficiently get to the core of a communication problem without all the overhead that generally accompanies a digital communication system. This book will start out at the beginning of the DSP realm—sampling a signal. The intermediate chapters will cover some basic building blocks and the final chapters will put it all together as a digital communication system.
A lot of signal processing books start out describing what a discrete time sequence is, the advantages of DSP over analog methods, and the like. This book skips all that and assumes that you already know enough about DSP to get started and you probably have some very good references regarding where to go when you do not understand something. Instead this book focuses on putting that DSP knowledge to work using LabVIEW. Also, at the end of each chapter is a list of references for the specific topics covered in that chapter. Of course the reader is encouraged to look at those references for any concept that is not quite clear. If your DSP is a little rusty, or if you are new to the topic, a good starting place would be to read Understanding Digital Signal Processing by Rick Lyons before moving to the more advanced texts such as Discrete-Time Signal Processing by Oppenheim and Schafer. The book by Lyons should give you a good intuitive feel for many complicated DSP subjects while the Oppenheim and Schafer book will give you all the gory details on how and why.
As with any subject, you can read about DSP all day long and not quite understand it until you actually put it into practice. Hopefully, after working your way through this book, you will not only get better at using LabVIEW, but your signal processing skills will be more instinctive. Most engineers and students are familiar with MatLAB because it is the most common DSP simulation environment. But this book attempts to show that almost everything that MatLAB can do, LabVIEW can do just as easily (and perhaps more easily). LabVIEW has two distinct areas where it excels over MatLAB: (1) its graphical nature—you can look at what is going on, not just interpret words on a page—and (2) its interface to external hardware and instruments. LabVIEW combines these characteristics with some very useful built-in functions to perform all sorts of signal processing. All of the examples in this book are compatible with LabVIEW 7.0 express evaluation version. This software may be downloaded free of charge from the National Instruments website and the software will run for 30 days. All references and built-in VIs are included in the 7.0 evaluation version and are not guaranteed to work on any other version of LabVIEW. The only exceptions to this will be the special toolsets that National Instruments ships with some of their RF measurement hardware. These VIs will not be necessary to experiment with any of the VIs in this book, but certain functions may be mentioned for completeness.Getting Started
Digital Communications and LabVIEW
Getting a Signal into LabVIEW
Building Blocks
Spectral Analysis
Digital Filters
Multirate Signal Processing in LabVIEW
Generating Signals with LabVIEW
Building a Communication System
Assembling the Pieces
System Performance
Optimizing LabVIEW Signal Processing
A. VI Reference
B. Hardware Resources