Appeal No. 2000-1900
Application No. 08/669,937
with the Examiner’s position as stated in the Answer. At the
outset, we note that we find Appellant’s assertions to be
unpersuasive with respect to the alleged lack of disclosure of
TDMA communication systems in the applied prior art. Our review
of the disclosure of Saleh reveals a clear indication of the
applicability of the described frequency hopping technique to
TDMA communication systems.
We further are in agreement with the Examiner with respect
to the interpretation of the “hard” decision operations disclosed
by both Wei and Saleh as related to the language of
representative claim 1. In our view, Appellant’s arguments
(Brief, page 9) merely repeat the critical language of claim 1,
i.e., “determining, . . . , a mathematical distance between the
sequence of test bits as known to the receiver and the sequence
of test bits as received by the receiver,” and draw the
unsupported conclusion that Wei and Saleh do not teach or suggest
such a claimed limitation. As such, we do not find such
arguments to be convincing of any error in the Examiner’s
position.
The “hard” decision operation performed on the interference
signal points disclosed at column 4, lines 6-14 of Wei is
contrasted with “soft” decisions in the sense that signal points
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