The purpose of a communication system is to transmit information- bearing signals through a communication channel.
Figure: Basic Block Diagram of a Communication System
Transmitter (source): process the input signal to produce a transmitted signal to match the characteristics of the channel
Channel: is the medium that connects the transmitter and the receiver (destination)
Receiver: operates on the output signal of the channel and decodes the signal to extract the message sent by the source
Information carrying signals are referred to as baseband signals
In general shifting of the range of frequencies of the baseband signals are achieved using a process called modulation
Modulation involves two wave forms:
A message signal o In the audio frequency range (20 20,000 Hz). In AM broadcasting (100 5000 Hz)
A carrier wave o In the US, commercial AM radio is broadcast on a carrier wave of 520 kHz to 1710 kHz, while the FM band is 87.5 MHz to 108 MHz.
Why we need modulation?
There are several good reasons that we need to modulate baseband signals as follows:
1. Modulation for Efficient Transmission
Line-of-sight propagation requires transmit antennas whose physical dimensions at least 1/10th of the signals wavelength
Figure: Wavelength of a sine wave
Examples:
Unmodulated audio signals down to 100 Hz require an antenna length of 300m!
Submarine communications use very low frequencies (76 Hz in the US and 82 Hz in Russia) a wavelength of 3,658.5 kms! Obviously, the usual half-wavelength dipole antenna cannot be constructed
On the other hand, at high frequencies better efficiency with reasonable size antennas
2. Modulation to overcome Hardware limitations
Cost and availability of hardware issues can be avoided. Modulation permits a designer to place the signal in some frequencies to avoid hardware limitations.
3. Modulation to reduce noise and interference
A simple method to overcome noise effects is to increase the signal power which is not desirable!
Wideband modulation techniques such as FM can suppress both noise and interference.
Therefore allows a designer to tradeoff between wideband width to low power
4. Modulation for frequency assignment
Obvious benefit of modulation is that it can be used for frequency assignment
If there is no modulation, only one radio can transmit at a given time in a given place!
In this course, we will study two types of continuous-wave modulation systems:
1. Amplitude modulation
2. Angle modulation (phase modulation and frequency modulation)
Properties of sinusoidal waves
Figure: Sinusoids
1. Wavelength 2. Frequency 3. Amplitude 4. Phase
Figure: Illustration of AM and FM signals produced by a single sine wave
Amplitude Modulation
In amplitude modulation, the amplitude of the sinusoidal carrier wave is linearly varied according to the amplitude of baseband signal.
Let us consider a sinusiodal carrier defined by
According to the above definition we can represent the AM wave as a function of time as follows:
is called the amplitude sensitivity (modulation index). In order for the envelope of the AM modulated signal s(t) to have the same shape as the message signal m(t):
1. The amplitude of must be always less than one. Mathematically we have:
for all t
The condition is called overmodulation and results in phase distortion (envelope can not be recovered)
Note: is referred to as the percentage modulation
2. The carrier frequency must be much larger than the message bandwidth
The carrier oscillates more rapidly compared to the message signal and hence m(t) can be visualized!
Exercise: Show that we can calculate using the following formula given by
where and are the maximum and minimum positive voltages of the AM modulated signal.
Average transmitted power of the AM signal
Average transmitted power is given by
Now apply
to yield
Now, if the message has no dc value, i.e.,
and
we have
Now we re-express the above expression as:
with
= power of the unmodulated carrier = power per sideband
Due to the constraint we can further show that
Remark: At least 50% of the power of the AM signal resides in the unmodulated carrier which does not convey any message signal
Example: A transmitter puts out a total power of 25 Watts of 30% AM signal. How much power is contained in the carrier and each of the sidebands? (Assume that
Figure: Illustration of % modulation effects on the amplitude modulation
Frequency spectrum of the AM signal
We can find the Fourier transform of the AM signal to find the frequency spectrum
How to obtain this expression?
Fourier transform is a linear operator. Hence we have
Next we write
And employ the frequency translation property
to obtain the Fourier transform of the second term as
Figure: Spectrum of the AM signal (Adapted from Simon Haykin, Communication Systems, 4 th Edition)
The spectrum consists of two parts:
1. Carrier signal 2. Message signal Remarks:
As a result of AM modulation, the spectrum of the message signal for negative frequencies W to 0 becomes completely visible in the positive frequencies.
Hence the transmission bandwidth is given by
As a double check we see that:
Example: A 500 KHz carrier is amplitude modulated by an audio signal which contains all frequencies in the range 300 Hz to 5 kHz.
(a) What are the frequency bands which are output? (b) What is the output bandwidth? (c) Draw the spectral diagram of these signals.
Limitations of AM modulation
Amplitude modulation is a wasteful of power!
Amplitude modulation is a wasteful of bandwidth!
We trade the system complexity for improved use of communication resources.
E.g. we may use a fairly simple envelope detector for AM demodulation
References [1] Simon Haykin, Communication Systems, 4 th Edition [2] A. Bruce Carlson, Communication Systems, 4 th Edition