3 ms·
> A baud is a raw bit in a digital data stream, it can either be data or part of the channel protocol. If we wanna be pedantic, a baud is not a bit, it's a sym
by lbourdages 3y ago
> A baud is a raw bit in a digital data stream, it can either be data or part of the channel protocol.
If we wanna be pedantic, a baud is not a bit, it's a symbol. It may be equivalent in some modulation schemes but in things like quadrature amplitude modulation, 1 baud > 1 bit. It goes up to 32768-QAM at 15 bits per symbol.
- ChuckMcM 3y agoYou are absolutely correct. My experience, which is by no means exhaustive, is that "symbol rate" vs "baud rate" vs "bit rate" and "protocol encoding" vs "data bits" are topics that go deep but can quickly overwhelm someone thinking about this stuff for the first time (or at least nearly so). So to reassure you I was trying to be more "accessible" than "precise" in my writing here. And yes, I often miss the mark and go too far one way or the other. That said building large constellation QAM modulator/demodulators is a lot of fun I've discovered, but building real world modems that can deal with fading, reflections, and multipath takes away the fun pretty quickly :-).
- Turing_Machine 3y agoYes. Suppose you're communicating with signal flags. You have a black flag and a white flag, and assign them to represent 0 and 1 respectively. If you can change flags once per second, you have a bit rate of 1 bit per second, and the baud rate is also 1 (1 flag change per second). Now suppose you have a red flag and a green flag as well, and assign black = 00, white = 01, red = 10, and green = 11. If it still takes you one second to change flags, the baud rate is still one. However, each symbol change now encodes two bits, so the bit rate has doubled, to two bits per second.