Symmetric Clipping a Signal

[BillDumke]

I want to symmetrically clip a signal such as is shown in the attached mathcad 15 document, but I am getting "out of memory" errors when I do it with large numbers of points. Is there a way to do this using less memory?

Bill

[MikeArmstrong]

Bill,

Do you get the "out of memory" error in the attached sheet?

I have Mathcad 14 and it seems ok.

Mike

[RichardJ]

What do you mean by "large"?

[jeanGiraud]

If you don't get an "out of memory" while reading the data set from file, it does not make sense that the algo that clips would create the "out of memory". Your clipping alo is probably not correct.

[IRstuff]

went up to 10,000,000 without a calculation error, although, Mathcad complains that there are too many points to plot

You can, of course, do the clipping in a single equation; see attached

TTFN

[IRstuff]

Done with more points

TTFN

[BillDumke]

Thanks, Eden. Your solution worked fine. Yesterday as I was leaving work I tried much larger numbers in the sheet I presented here and found it worked fine as you did. So it must have been some mistake on my part in the other document that caused the "out of memory" errors. I redid it with your method first and then put back in the old solution I had used and they both worked fine today. But your solution is more elegant, so I will use that.

Clipping in the RF world means what I described. Just like variable names can mean quite different things in different technologies, so can words like "clipping". For example, I just typed "clipping" in Google and came up with this page at the top of the list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipping_(audio)

Anyway, thanks for all the help.

Bill

[IRstuff]

Yup, no problems, Clipping is a venerable term for EEs. Probably some good arguments still go on about whether tube amps or transistor amps are better when clipping.

TTFN

[jeanGiraud]

Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name.

Clipping is a form of distortion that limits a signal once it exceeds a threshold.

I have no problem with either flat or soft cutoff.

Technically, "clipping" implies more functionallity.

I'm not detracting your interpretation, it might lead to confusion unless you define that a carrot is a monkey.

jmG

[jeanGiraud]

So much interesting that "clipping' meant "clipping" to me, but from your transited picture, "clipping" means truncation !

jmG

[jeanGiraud]

>I want to symmetrically clip a signal ...<

________________________________

Right there, you have defined... defined enough to conclude you wanted a pivot clipping ... a pivot clipping either symmetric/asymmetric about a point in the data set [because a signal is not a function, just data]. Like giving water to a thirsty person: boiling water will burn, too cold ice will burn ... "potable water" is implicit of "drinkable water", no burn this time.