Digital milliwatt (original) (raw)

In digital telephony, the digital milliwatt is a standard test signal that serves as a reference for analog signal levels in the telecommunications network. When decoding the digital milliwatt, a PCM decoder produces a sinusoidal signal with a frequency of 1 kHz with one milliwatt in power (0 dBm). The digital milliwatt signal is encoded by eight 8-bit words corresponding to one pulse-code modulated cycle of the signal, sampled 8000 times per second. It is typically stored in read-only memory (ROM) in the telecommunication equipment.