Problem 45803. SatCom #7: Thermal Noise in a Receiver

Created by Mark Posen

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Satellite and Space Engineering - Problem #7
This is part of a series of problems looking at topics in satellite and space communications and systems engineering.
Determine the thermal (Gaussian) noise power (dBW) in a radio receiver (in this case we are thinking of a satellite receiver, but the approach is generic to all radio receivers).
You are given the bandwidth of the receiver (in Hz) and the receiving system noise temperature (in Kelvin).
You should take Boltzmann's constant to be 1.380649×10^−23 J/K.
Hint: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_figure#General - but don't forget to convert to dB!
Example: The thermal noise power in a satellite receiver with a bandwidth of 2 MHz and a receiving system noise temperature of 200 K is around -142.6 dB.
Some future problems in this series will build on work done in previous problems, so if you get a working solution I suggest you hang onto the code!

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Last Solution submitted on Jan 05, 2026

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Addison Conzet on 1 Mar 2023

I passed all the tests but the regex fails.

Error msg:
Error using contains First argument must be text. Error in Test4 (line 4) assert(isequal(sum(contains(s,'regexp')),y_correct))

Addison Conzet on 1 Mar 2023

fixed by suppressing outputs

Dyuman Joshi on 1 Mar 2023

That is weird, as un-suppressing outputs usually should not have any problem to solution.

I checked the test suite and found that the OP used importdata instead of fileread to check for regexp, which caused that particular error. I have edited the test case.

@Addison your earlier solution is rescored to be correct.

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Problem 45803. SatCom #7: Thermal Noise in a Receiver

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Problem 45803. SatCom #7: Thermal Noise in a Receiver

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