Appeal No. 2004-0991
Application No. 09/152,063
OPINION
We have carefully considered the entire record before us, and
we will sustain the anticipation rejection of claims 25 through 27,
29 through 37 and 42 through 46, and reverse the anticipation
rejection of claims 39, 40 and 48.
We agree with the examiner’s findings (answer, page 3) that
Stein discloses all of the method steps of claim 25. Stein decodes
a received signal at each of four postulated rates, and generates a
corresponding decoded signal and a corresponding decoding metric
(Figure 2). The rate selector 250 modifies the decoding metric to
form a normalized correlation metric based on the corresponding
postulated rate (column 7, line 1 through column 8, line 47), and,
in view of the teaching that “rate selector 250 selects the highest
normalized correlation metric in storage and . . . determines the
rate . . . corresponding to this normalized correlation metric”
(column 8, lines 48 through 51), the rate selector 250 determines
the most likely rate at which the received signal was encoded as
being the postulated rate associated with the maximum modified
decoding metric. We additionally agree with the examiner’s
contention (answer, page 8) that the open-ended language of claim
25 does not preclude the re-encoding, delay and correlator
teachings of Stein. Accordingly, the anticipation rejection of
3
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007