ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author wishes to express his great appreciatl.on

to Dr. George J. Thaler of the Electrical Engineering
Department of the Naval Postgraduate School for the guidance
and helpful suggestions in the preparation of this work.
4.
I. INTRODUCTION
Automatic Gain Control (AGC) is a closed loop regulating
system the purpose cP' which is to provide closely controlled
signal amplitude at the output, despite the variation of
ampli.tude and frequency in the input signal. The above
goal .s generally accomplished by feeding back a measure of
the oz;. ut sigral and hrough this adjusting the gain by
which;.,' input 3irial is multiplied.
Hti orisa!J t first appearance of AGC systems in
electronics cal, be placed as early as 1923 when a form of
AGC was obtained by using triodes, biased from the detector,
to shunt the antenna circuit. In this instance it was
intended for limiting the noise produced by strong atmospherics.
A later method employed a mechanical control to
reduce the capacitance between the antenna and receiver;
the moving coil of a milliammeter connected in the detector
anode circuit actuated the moving vanes of the antenna
capacitance.
The introduction of variable mu R.F. tubes marked a most
important step in the history of AGC, for control of R.F.
gain by grid bias became possible. The bias was derived
from the D.C. component of the detected carrier output
voltage.
Today with the immense expansion of electronic's applications,
AGC systems are used almost inevitably in electronic