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

Created by Mark Posen

Solve Later

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!

Solve

Solution Stats

100 Solutions
62 Solvers

Last Solution submitted on Sep 25, 2025

Last 200 Solutions

Problem Comments

3 Comments

3 Comments

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.

Solution Comments

Show comments

Problem Recent Solvers62

Problem Tags

Community Treasure Hunt

Find the treasures in MATLAB Central and discover how the community can help you!

Start Hunting!

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

Solution Stats

Last 200 Solutions

Problem Comments

Solution Comments

Problem Recent Solvers62

Suggested Problems

More from this Author17

Problem Tags

Community Treasure Hunt

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

Solution Stats

Last 200 Solutions

Problem Comments

Solution Comments

Problem Recent Solvers62

Suggested Problems

More from this Author17

Problem Tags

Community Treasure Hunt

Players