Category: Blog Notes

Blog Notes and Reader Poll

Final Update on “Future Posts” Poll:

So among the CSP Blog readers that voted, I think the consensus is to produce more “on brand” posts on CSP and the Signal-Processing ToolKit. Also, there is significant interest in doing CSP with GNU Radio, which I have considerable experience with, and so I’ll likely be posting some flowgraph ideas and results at some point in 2023.

Thanks everybody! (But I’ll still rant and rave from time to time; sorry!)

Update June 25, 2023: When I said you can vote multiple times, I didn’t mean to ‘spam’ the poll (as my kids would say). Someone just voted for one of the responses ten times in a row (same IP address ten votes within one minute). I meant you can vote for several different items in the poll! So I did remove some of those identical votes. I’ll close the poll at the end of the day June 30.

Update May 11, 2023: Please vote in the Reader Poll below (multiple times if you’d like) soon! As of today, CSP Applications and Signal Processing ToolKit are in the lead, with Rants and Datasets at the bottom.

The CSP Blog is rolling along here in 2023!

March 2023 broke a record for pageviews in a calendar month with over 7,000 as of this writing early in the day on March 31.

Let’s note some other milestones and introduce a poll.

Milestones

What a month! We’re at about 7,145 views right now, and the previous monthly record is 6,482.

2023 was the year that a CSP Blog post crossed the 20,000-view milestone: The Spectral Correlation Function. The Cyclic Autocorrelation Function is not far behind.

About 84,000 visitors have been counted over the years since the CSP Blog launched in 2015, with 5,500 this year already. I believe this is just a count of the unique IP addresses that have accessed a page. But the number of subscribers is only 198! You can subscribe (“Follow”) to the CSP Blog by entering an email address in the “Follow Blog via Email” box on the right edge of any viewed page, near the top of the page. You’ll get notified through that email address whenever there is a new post. CSP Blog readers cannot see that email address, just as they cannot see the email address associated with any comment, unless there is an associated gravatar.

Reader Poll

I’m planning to have more time available to devote to improving and extending the CSP Blog over the next few months. If you want to have input into that process, consider voting in the poll below.

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Future Posts

What type of CSP Blog post do you most want to see in 2023?

The poll has expired!

Thanks so much to all my readers!

‘Comment of the Month’ on the CSP Blog

Introducing swag for the best CSP-Blog commenters.

Update January 2023: You can find the list of winners on this page.

The comments that CSP Blog readers have made over the past six years are arguably the most helpful part of the Blog for do-it-yourself CSP practitioners. In those comments, my many errors have been revealed, which then has permitted me to attempt post corrections. Many unclear aspects of a post have been clarified after pondering a reader’s comment. At least one comment has been elevated to a post of its own.

The readership of the CSP Blog has been steadily growing since its inception in 2015, but the ratio of page views to comments remains huge–the vast majority of readers do not comment. This is understandable and perfectly acceptable. I rarely comment on any of the science and engineering blogs that I frequent. Nevertheless, I would like to encourage more commenting and also reward it.

Continue reading “‘Comment of the Month’ on the CSP Blog”

Blog Notes and Preview

May 2022 saw 6026 page views at the CSP Blog, a new monthly record!

Thanks so much to all my readers, new and old, signal processors and machine learners, commenters and lurkers.

My next non-ranty post is on frequency-shift (FRESH) filtering. I will go over cyclic Wiener filtering (The Literature [R6]), which is optimal FRESH filtering, and then describe some interesting puzzles and problems with CW filtering, which may form the seeds of some solid signal-processing research projects of the academic sort.

Shifted Dataset for the Machine-Learning Challenge: How Well Does a Modulation-Recognition DNN Generalize? [Dataset CSPB.ML.2022]

Another RF-signal dataset to help push along our R&D on modulation recognition.

Update February 2023: A third dataset has been posted to the CSP Blog: CSPB.ML.2023. It features cochannel signals.

Update January 2023: I’m going to put Challenger results in the Comments. I’ve received a Challenger’s decisions and scored them in January 2023. See below.

In this post I provide a second dataset for the Machine-Learning Challenge I issued in 2018 (CSPB.ML.2018). This dataset is similar to the original dataset, but possesses a key difference in that the probability distribution of the carrier-frequency offset parameter, viewed as a random variable, is not the same, but is still realistic.

Blog Note: By WordPress’ count, this is the 100th post on the CSP Blog. Together with a handful of pages (like My Papers and The Literature), these hundred posts have resulted in about 250,000 page views. That’s an average of 2,500 page views per post. However, the variance of the per-post pageviews is quite large. The most popular is The Spectral Correlation Function (> 16,000) while the post More on Pure and Impure Sinewaves, from the same era, has only 316 views. A big Thanks to all my readers!!

Continue reading “Shifted Dataset for the Machine-Learning Challenge: How Well Does a Modulation-Recognition DNN Generalize? [Dataset CSPB.ML.2022]”

Wave Walker DSP: A New Kind of Engineering Blog

A colleague has started up a website with lots of content on digital signal processing: Wave Walker DSP. This is, to me, a new kind of engineering blog in that it blends DSP mathematics and practice with philosophy. That’s an intriguing complement to my engineering blog, which I view as blending DSP mathematics with criticism.

Continue reading “Wave Walker DSP: A New Kind of Engineering Blog”

Worth the Price of a (Fancy) Cup of Coffee?

Just a reminder that if you are getting some value out of the CSP Blog, I would appreciate it if you could make a donation to offset my costs: I do pay WordPress to keep ads off the site! I also pay extra for a class of service that allows me to post large data sets like the one for the Machine-Learner Challenge.


If everyone that derived value from the CSP Blog were to donate $5, I’d have enough leftover for at least a couple cups of fancy coffee.

50,000 Page Views in 2020

And counting …

Last evening the CSP Blog crossed the 50,000 page-view threshold for 2020, a yearly total that has not been achieved previously!

I want to thank each reader, each commenter, and each person that’s clicked the Donate button. You’ve made the CSP Blog the success it is, and I am so grateful for the time you spend here.

On these occasions I put some of the more interesting CSP-Blog statistics below the fold. If you have been wanting to see a post on a particular CSP or Signal Processing ToolKit topic, and it just hasn’t appeared, feel free to leave me a note in the Comments section.

Continue reading “50,000 Page Views in 2020”

Blog Notes: New Page with All CSP Blog Posts in Chronological Order

To aid navigating the CSP Blog, I’ve added a new page called “All CSP Blog Posts.” You can find the page link at the top of the home page, or in various lists on the right side of the Blog, such as “Pages” and “Site Navigation.”

Let me know in the Comments if there are other ways that you think I can improve the usability of the site.

h/t: Reader Clint.

New Look for a New Year and New Decade

2020 is the fifth full year of existence for the CSP Blog, and the beginning of a new decade that will be full of CSP explorations. I thought I’d freshen up the look of the Blog, so I’ve switched the theme. It is a cleaner look with fewer colors and no more hexagons. I’m not completely happy with it, so I might change it yet again. Let me know if you have problems viewing the content or posting a comment (cmspooner at ieee dot org).

Happy New Year to all my readers!

Sponsoring the CSP Blog

I’ve decided to solicit donations to the CSP Blog through PayPal. For the past four years, I’ve been writing blog posts and doing my best to answer comments at no cost to my readers. And it has turned out very well indeed, thanks to all the people that stop by to read and contribute.

Continue reading “Sponsoring the CSP Blog”

For the Beginner at CSP

Here is a list of links to CSP Blog posts that I think are suitable for a beginner: read them in the order given.

How to Obtain Help from the CSP Blog

Introduction to CSP

How to Create a Simple Cyclostationary Signal: Rectangular-Pulse BPSK

The Cyclic Autocorrelation Function

The Spectral Correlation Function

The Cyclic Autocorrelation for BPSK

Continue reading “For the Beginner at CSP”

On The Shoulders

What modest academic success I’ve had in the area of cyclostationary signal theory and cyclostationary signal processing is largely due to the patient mentorship of my doctoral adviser, William (Bill) Gardner, and the fact that I was able to build on an excellent foundation put in place by Gardner, his advisor Lewis Franks, and key Gardner students such as William (Bill) Brown.

Continue reading “On The Shoulders”

100,000 Page Views!

The CSP Blog has reached 100,000 page views! Also, a while back it passed the “20,000 visitors” milestone. All of this for 53 posts and 10 pages. More to come!

yearly_totals

I started the CSP Blog in late 2015, so it has taken a bit over three years to get to 100,000 views. I don’t know if that should be considered fast or slow. But I like it anyway.

I want to thank each and every one of the visitors to the CSP Blog. It has reached so many more people that I though it ever would when I started it.

Thank you for all your clicks, comments, emails, and downloads! If you’d like, leave a comment to this post if you have an idea for a post you’d like to see.

Below the fold, some graphics that show the vital statistics of the CSP Blog as of the 100,000 page-view milestone.

Continue reading “100,000 Page Views!”

Useful Signal Processing Blogs or Websites?

Update November 1, 2018: A site called feedspot (blog.feedspot.com) contacted me to tell me I made their “Top 10 Digital Signal Processing Blogs, Websites & Newsletters in 2018” list. Weirdly, there are only eight blogs in the list. What’s most important for this post is the other signal processing blogs on the list. So check it out if you are looking for other sources of online signal processing information. Enjoy!  blog.feedspot.com/digital_signal_processing_blogs

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Some of my CSP posts get a lot of comments asking for help, and that’s a good thing. I continue to try to help readers to help themselves. Throughout my posts, I link terms and methods to webpages that provide tutorial or advanced information, and most of the time that means wikipedia.

But I’d like to be able to refer readers to good websites that discuss related aspects of signal processing and communication signals, such as filtering, spectrum estimation, mathematical models, Fourier analysis, etc. I’ve had little success with the Google searches I’ve tried.

Continue reading “Useful Signal Processing Blogs or Websites?”

CSP Patent: Tunneling

Tunneling == Purposeful severe undersampling of wideband communication signals. If some of the cyclostationarity property remains, we can exploit it at a lower cost.

My colleague Dr. Apurva Mody (of BAE Systems, AiRANACULUS, IEEE 802.22, and the WhiteSpace Alliance) and I have received a patent on a CSP-related invention we call tunneling. The US Patent is 9,755,869 and you can read it here or download it here. We’ve got a journal paper in review and a 2013 MILCOM conference paper (My Papers [38]) that discuss and illustrate the involved ideas. I’m also working on a CSP Blog post on the topic.

Update December 28, 2017: Our Tunneling journal paper has been accepted for publication in the journal IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking. You can download the pre-publication version here.

Continue reading “CSP Patent: Tunneling”

CSP Blog Highlights

Welcome to the CSP Blog!

To help new readers, I’m supplying here links to the posts that have gotten the most attention over the lifetime of the Blog. Omitted from this list are the more esoteric topics as well as most of the posts that comment on the engineering literature.

Click the button below to follow the CSP Blog:

Follow Cyclostationary Signal Processing on WordPress.com

Use this button to donate to the CSP Blog:

Support the CSP Blog and Keep it Ad-Free

Please consider donating to the CSP Blog to keep it ad-free and to support the addition of major new features. The small box below is used to specify the number of $5 donations.

$5.00

You can see a pre-publication version of my latest CSP journal paper, on “tunneling”, here.

Here are some highlights:

Continue reading “CSP Blog Highlights”

Blog Notes and How to Obtain Help with Your CSP Work

The CSP Blog has been getting lots of new visitors these past few months; welcome to all!

Following the CSP Blog

If you want to receive an email each time I publish a new post, look for the Follow Blog via Email widget on the right side of the Blog and enter an email address.

 

Continue reading “Blog Notes and How to Obtain Help with Your CSP Work”

Blog Notes

In the near future, I’ll post on two new topics: Time-Delay Estimation and the Cyclic Polyspectrum.

The blog is getting good traffic:

csp_blog_stats_April_2016

But not many comments.

So, feel free to comment on this post with your suggestions on topics that you’d like to see discussed on the CSP blog. Now is your chance to influence my direction over the next weeks and months.

Thanks for reading!