How to Master 5G NR Physical Layer in 30 Days — A Realistic Roadmap
A 30-day learning roadmap for the 5G NR physical layer. Week-by-week topic schedule, recommended TS sections, hands-on exercises, and the trap many engineers fall into.
Hands-on articles on 5G NR PHY, O-RAN, NTN, HARQ, beam management, frame structure — by engineers who shipped the systems, for engineers building them now.
A 30-day learning roadmap for the 5G NR physical layer. Week-by-week topic schedule, recommended TS sections, hands-on exercises, and the trap many engineers fall into.
Visual guide to 5G NR frame structure — 10 ms frame, half-frames, subframes, slots across 7 numerologies, OFDM symbols, mini-slots, and TDD slot patterns side-by-side.
High-level 5G NR PHY for RAN architects — layer-1 vs layer-2 boundaries, gNB-CU vs gNB-DU split, O-RAN 7-2x lower-layer split, fronthaul implications, and the design questions an architect actually needs to answer.
Complete worked example computing 5G NR PDSCH throughput for a 100 MHz @ 30 kHz cell — TBS calculation, layer mapping, MCS table lookup, and final Mbps. By hand, no spreadsheet.
Deep dive on how HARQ soft combining works in 5G NR — Chase combining, incremental redundancy, soft buffer management, redundancy version selection, and when each is actually used.
A working RF engineer's mental model for mmWave beam management — SSB beam sweep, CSI-RS-based refinement, beam failure recovery, and what changes between 28 GHz and 39 GHz deployments.
What operators actually configure on n78 (3.5 GHz mid-band 5G) — typical TDD pattern, BWP layout, MCS distributions, beam patterns, and the trade-offs between coverage and capacity.
In-depth engineering story of why 3GPP replaced LTE's turbo codes with LDPC (data) and polar (control) for 5G NR — error floor behavior, complexity at higher rates, decoder parallelism, and the politics.
Cinematic video courses on 5G Core, O-RAN, and NTN — every interface, every IE, every procedure. Lifetime access, browser labs included.