Digital compression

Digital compression is now an essential characteristic of satellite transmissions, and as we have already seen, increasingly in terrestrial microwave as well. Compression is a highly complex subject, and to fully explain is far beyond the scope of this book, but we do need to have some concept of the process in order to understand its fundamental advantages (and disadvantages!).

So why would we want to compress a signal? The answer is that in an ideal world, we would not. If we had unlimited bandwidth available to us to send our information, then there would be no need for compression. Unfortunately, bandwidth is a valuable resource, and great efforts are made to make sure that there is efficient use of it.

Digital compression ...

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