Digital Transmission & Signal Processing Thorsten Herfet, Kelvin Chelli, Andreas Schmidt

Dear students,

as you all are aware the University is locked-down until April 24th, 2020 due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemia.

We therefore cancel the originally scheduled re-exam on March 25th. As the situation is not yet clear enough we will at this point in time not yet fix a new date, but will keep you informed as soon as legally and ethically we are convinced that we can hold the exam without putting anyone in danger to get infected and get sick or, what's even more important, infect others.

Let me use this occasion to very seriously plead for taking all the measures implemented by the local and national governments very sincere!  Do your utmost to prevent the virus from spreading. Since most of you will not even really notice when being infected consider it an ethical duty to restrict social contacts as much as possible! There's still a lack of awareness, parties going on and people going shopping beyond their daily needs. This is really dangerous and we only have little time left to flatten the curve!

As DTSP students and engineers you know exponential curves better than most citizens, so be a role-model and convince others to obey the rules!

Best

Thorsten

Many thanks to the student who has given us elaborate feedback (it's anonymous, so that I answer via the news).
Would appreciate if the student can write a mail so that we can also talk face to face.

I just want to make sure:

• It has been perfectly appropriate (the student was unsure whether it was, but yes, carefully worded and clearly understandable). Many thanks!
• We will consider it seriously, and I would very much like to use one of the remaining lecture hours to discuss this also in class.

We've run through many cycles and we've changed the teaching method in many aspects (actually also to be honest "trying" things that seem fashionable or have been invented by the University as new tools). We have received the busy beaver award for two of our lectures.

• We started with a manuscript without any prosa, so that the class provides all information "between" the lines. We also linked to two very detailed books and have >20 samples of each of the books (Proakis and Oppenheim) in the CS library.
  Feedback has been that students prefer a self-contained manuscript and that the background literature is just too much to cope with.
• Consequently we changed to a self contained (PDF) manuscript, which BTW is still available if you prefer to have it. To stay very near to the material I used Xournal to annotate the script during the lecture. This whole process has been as self-contained and complete as possible.
• We accompanied the whole lecture by a MATLAB toolbox (a lot of effort to implement it) so that students don't simply need to "believe" in graphs (like in textbooks) but can play around with nearly every element to cross check their understanding. We also heavily fought for the MATLAB campus license so that everyone can use this toolbox without additional costs.
  Feedback has been that it is complicated to a) find the right source codes and b) understand and use it. And it often simply fell of the priority list, so that only few students made use of it (with a high correlation to good grades, but of course it's hard to say whether only good students used it or students became good by using it...)

So during the summer term 2019 the team once again spent a really huge amount of work on changing the material to a new method. Purpose has been to enable having slides, HTML manuscripts (usable anytime and anywhere for the students) and a PDF book, all from the same source which therefore can more easily evolve over the years.

As an additional "bonbon" we are now able to integrate the code, so that there's no barrier to find it in a toolbox anymore. We also tried to simplify the code so that it -- even though not providing the best possible programming style (which CS students might criticize...) -- is easily readable and understandable.

It's important for us to hear that we're not yet there and that still the feeling is that the provided material is not ideal. It has been the first run with it, so there surely is room for improvement and hence I look forward to discuss which path would be one that students feel most comfortable with.

Best

Thorsten Herfet

As announced in the Lecture, on 17.12.2019 and potentially 18.12.2019 we will work out some exam 'similar' questions during the lecture along with discussing the structure of the exam and the points. We will also give you some tips to prepare for the exam so that you can start your exam preparations. Please bring with you, writing equipment (pen, paper) and a calculator.

Dear students,

after the long (and admittedly confusing) discussion in last week's tutorial (w.r.t. Task Sheet 02, Task 2c), we found the following:

• The sample solution is correct (and not broken).
• You can get to it using either "shift then scale" or "scale then shift" (so math is also not broken, as we already said in the tutorial).

We are going to spend the end of the next tutorial showing you how to do it properly and how to minimize your risk of doing it wrong (all ways work, but with some you must pay more attention).

If you want to play around a little bit, feel free to apply the Fourier definition directly to the signal and try to get to the sample solution (without applying correspondencies).

So again, apologies for the confusion and see you all on Friday when we get this thing clear!

Best regards
The DTSP-Team

Dear all,

after several requests, we have figured out a means to share the jupyter notebooks more "thoroughly". You can now find a "Download Images" link in the "Resources" menu. Extract the folder in a way that the PICS folder is at the same level as your .ipynb files. They should now render properly when you open jupyter notebook.

Best regards,
The DTSP-Team

Dear DTSP students,

as we got many inquiries, let us clarify what content is tested in the quizzes:

Assume you write a quiz at the end of lecture week N (we start counting at 1 like MATLAB does). In this case, the tasks in the quiz cover the content from the very first lecture until (including) the lectures in week N-1. Naturally, a strong focus is put on the unique content of week N-1, but as we build up knowledge, you should not forget about week N-1 when week N+1 starts.

We hope this helps and wish you good luck. See you tomorrow in C6.3 Rm. 9.05 at 14:15!

Best Regards,
The DTSP-Team

Dear DTSP students,

as we got several inquiries, here is a clarification:

• This week (CW43), there is no tutorial on Friday (and hence no quiz).
• Next week (CW44), the first official tutorial and quiz happen on Oct 31st at 14:15 in C6.3 Room 9.05 (physics tower). The quiz takes 15min, after which we will discuss the first task sheet.

Have a nice tutorial-free week!

Best regards,
The DTSP-Team

Dear students,

as you made us aware of collisions with mandatory courses in collaborating study programs, we had to move the tutorial to a new slot. The slot has been jointly decided upon in today's lecture and we are going to stick to this now.

The tutorials are now scheduled to Fridays 12:15 - 13:45 in E1.3 Seminar Room 016 (basement of the computer science building). As the first tutorial falls on a public holiday (Nov 1st), we shift it to Oct 31st and will inform you in time about the exact time and space.

For the office hour on MATLAB/Jupyter/Pipenv this Friday, we meet at the regular place and time (12:15, E1.3 Rm 016).

If you still have collisions with other courses, you are nevertheless obliged to take part in (a sufficient number of) quizzes that happen in the first 15min of each tutorial. Please let us know in case you want us to talk to the instructors of the colliding course and tell them about the issue, so that you must not fear making a bad impression by coming late each and every week due to the quiz.

Best regards
The DTSP-Team

NOTE: The dates have been updated due to a reschedule of the tutorials.

Dear DTSP students,

as announced in today's lecture, there will be an "office hour" on MATLAB/Pipenv/Jupyter in order to help you set up your system.

The office hour takes place at the slot when the usual tutorial will happen, i.e. this Fr, 18th Oct at 12:15. There will be no quiz (except from "have you already installed your MATLAB?").

Details on how you can set up the things yourself can be found in the Task Sheet 01 (see materials section). Please read it before the office hour to save yourself some time. Installing MATLAB involves an account creation (for the campus license) so it also makes sense to do this as soon as possible.

The task sheet itself will be discussed (after the accompanying quiz) on Th, 31st Oct. This is going to be in another slot as the usual tutorial, as Fr, 1st Nov is a public holiday.

In general, task sheets are released every Tuesday. The second task sheet will be released on Tu, 29th Oct., after which a new one appears every week, without further notice via email.

Have a good semester start and see you on Friday for the office hour.

Best regards
The DTSP Team