Appeal No. 96-3366
Application 08/292,700
“various sounds selected so as to be distinguishable from known sounds.”
Appellants urge that error detection/correction is not inherent or obvious to Marui because
Marui deals with analog signals, which those of ordinary skill in the art would have recognized to be
incompatible with error detection/correction.
In response to the prior argument, the examiner states that the claims of Marui are not limited to
tones, simulated voice alarms and/or visual displays. Rather, they encompass visual indications and
generic sounds (i.e., claim 2). The use of a simulated analog RF noise signal in Marui would have been
obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art because one would want to design an indicator that would be
distinctive from other cellular phones. Purportedly, this is an arbitrary design choice because one of
ordinary skill could design an infinite plurality of sounds to indicate to a user the approach of a
boundary.
With respect to appellants’ latter argument, the examiner asserts the issue is whether Marui can
be modified to the extent that the bit error rate measurement can be utilized as an indication of the
approach of the fringe coverage limit for a cellular telephone apparatus. It is urged that the modification
would have been obvious because to use bit error rates (BER) or signal quality to determine the limit of
a transmitter’s coverage is a complementary analysis to received signal strength. The examiner’s
rationale at page 4 of the answer is,
In other words, when signal strength is low, noise is going to obscure your signal
thereby introducing errors. So if one is monitoring signal strength to determine when
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Last modified: November 3, 2007