How is it that you can be a masters student in electrical
engineering, and *not* know that noise signals are simply the
super-position
of a large series of sinusoidal (or near-sinusoidal) functions?
Once again, the ADCs in an SDR receiver are sampling a complex
voltage.
That voltage may occupy any values between {-adc_resolution,
+adc_resolution}. In UHD, the ADC values are scaled (normalized)
into the range {-1.0, +1.0} to make things within the flow-graph
somewhat more general, and allow a certain amount of hardware
independance.
In general, the samples of a noise source will be equally
distributed about 0, and in fact you can confirm this by calculating
the
running-average of all your samples--they will tend to converge to
0 (in practice, there will be a small amount of DC offset which
will cause this convergence to be not exactly at zero).
But all this should be in course textbooks, etc. The folks here are
generally kind, and patient, but they can't hope to teach people
entire
courses in electrical engineering, RF design, linear and
non-linear circuit theory, and digital signal processing. Although,
those who
*do*, generally charge money for it, in one way or another.
--
Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
http://www.sbrac.org