RE: [Discuss-gnuradio] Test cases for validation of AM/FM receive r

[Ettus, Matt]

> A theoretical question: why does compressing with bzip2 help with that
> kind of data?  Clearly, there are patterns in RF signals, but 
> from what
> I understood, I wouldn't have imagined that these were patterns which
> bzip2 could compress.  Doesn't bzip2 compression rely on finding
> redundancy in the form of repeated strings of bytes?  Why would those
> occur so often in RF sample data?


I wondered about that too.  Here's how I justify it:

We record 12 bit samples, store them in 16 bits.  25% right there

The signal levels used allow a lot of headroom, leaving no information in
higher bits.  The law of large numbers says the data is essentially normally
distributed, so the average signal is maybe 10x down from the peaks.

Matt