Why hands-on and why real signals?

Digital signal processing (DSP) has been taught at the University of Reading since 1987 to all second year undergraduates in electronic engineering. The teaching includes hands-on laboratory work using an audio-band DSP system built around a Texas Instruments TMS320C25 digital signal processor. Analogue input and output signals are used, digitised to 10-bits at a sample rate of up to 48 kHz. Some anecdotal evidence is given to support the author´s belief that hands-on experience of DSP with real signals and real instruments is an essential part of any undergraduate course or series of courses in DSP. A further aspect of DSP teaching with real signals and instruments is the opportunity it provides to develop students´ general skills in electronics laboratory work. The rest of the paper presents a brief overview of the laboratory work run at the University of Reading followed by a discussion of specific aspects of the teaching which seem to be of benefit to students, including demonstration of aliasing and quantization noise, the effects of anti-alias and signal recovery filters and the manner in which transversal filter coefficients are loaded into the DSP system