Set the ADRV9002 manual gain
Set it such that a single carrier at our maximum expected receive level sits roughly 20–24 dB below ADC full scale.
If you are like me, this might sound alarmingly low for one carrier, but it's exactly the situation our stim script's Eb/N0 commentary documents. The per-channel normalizer's whole job is recovering quieter signals in the channels, and it has 36 dB of gain range to do so. What we can add later is a slow, software-supervised trim of the manual gain based on total-band power with some heavy hysteresis (seconds, not symbols), which is also standard practice. So: manual gain, frozen during operation, and plan-of-attack item 19's startup-saturation transient becomes part of the documented bring-up sequence and not a mystery or a guess.
Set the ADRV9002 manual gain
Set it such that a single carrier at our maximum expected receive level sits roughly 20–24 dB below ADC full scale.
If you are like me, this might sound alarmingly low for one carrier, but it's exactly the situation our stim script's Eb/N0 commentary documents. The per-channel normalizer's whole job is recovering quieter signals in the channels, and it has 36 dB of gain range to do so. What we can add later is a slow, software-supervised trim of the manual gain based on total-band power with some heavy hysteresis (seconds, not symbols), which is also standard practice. So: manual gain, frozen during operation, and plan-of-attack item 19's startup-saturation transient becomes part of the documented bring-up sequence and not a mystery or a guess.