Minimum Frequency of FM Data / Catastrophic Error Scenario?

[Averagesupernova]

@Silly Questions I've had a hard time figuring out how to reply to a lot of your posts. It's obvious you are putting thought into this but it seems that you have a little bit of knowledge and start making assumptions after that.
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You speak of fidelity. That is a very loosely defined word. I can have a recording studio that captures sound well above 40 khz. Then 'dumb it down' and cut off all the frequencies above the range of human hearing. Have I reduced the fidelity of the signal? Clearly I have taken away signals but considering I never heard them in the first place the fidelity remains acceptable. Same way with attenuation. The signal can be attenuated, then amplified to the intended level. As long as the signal did not get reduced to the point that the noise floor becomes audible we have an acceptable signal fidelity-wise. Again, fidelity being a loosely defined word.
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Now considering this wind mill blade thing chopping up the signal. The actual truth is that you cannot do anything non-linear to a sine wave without creating new frequencies. You are not just varying the amplitude of the carrier with a power control knob on a transmitter when you rapidly move it back and forth. You create sidebands. Yep, new frequencies. If you diddle the power control knob at a rate of 10 cycles per second, you have sidebands 10 Hertz either side of the carrier, and the amplitude of the carrier itself remains unchanged on a spectrum analyzer. Difficult to believe, but it's true. Now when you use the windmill blades to reduce the signal with each passing blade, think of it as modulating both the carrier as well as the sidebands. Suppose a given rpm of the blade puts us at 100 Hertz. Every signal will be affected. The windmill doesn't care which is the carrier and which is the sideband(s). Each sideband as well as the carrier will now have side bands 100 Hertz either side. Confused even more?

 

[Silly Questions]

If the original question is more-or-less, "How does an AM receiver distinguish between modulation versus carrier attenuation," and the answer is, "it can't," that comports with the idea that all changes to carrier amplitude will be interpreted as "modulation". So I'm actually less confused!

The next question, "Wouldn't there be a minimum frequency below which you'd have to call a change to the carrier 'attenuation' rather than 'modulation'?" I think I can answer myself. 3 seconds will sound like this:

THAT'S ONE SMALL STEP FOR *POP* man, one giant *POP* LEAP FOR MANKIND

But if the *POP*'s themselves are subtly altered into Morse code to tap out, "Help! I'm trapped in this windmill!" then not only is there a 3-second side-band it's actually carrying information. Any "minimum frequency" would seem to exist only relative to whether the analyzer can observe at least two events.

(Aliens winking out prime numbers atop their instructions for building spaceships send their regards.)

 

[sophiecentaur]

I don't think you can guarantee a reduction in fidelity just because the signal strength is reduced. Until you get into the noise floor, simply attenuating the signal shouldn't be a big deal.

The characteristics of any added noise have an effect but the info carried by a digital is not harmed until a high enough noise spike occurs. The original digitization has already introduced an ‘acceptable’ distortion / noise. So that may or may not be considered a downside. The raw digital data can be compressed without losing information as long as you can use a long enough delay in the processing. The noise is replaced by error bursts.

Problem is that the fancier the system, the more definite the threshold of operation.
It’s like wide deviation FM which has a pro rata noise advantage but which dies catastrophically once the input filter let's enough noise power in. There’s nothing as robust as AM under really noisy conditions. Your brain pulls out some sort of message from dreadful (unpleasant to listen to ) shash.

 

[sophiecentaur]

But if the *POP*'s themselves are subtly altered into Morse code to tap out, "Help! I'm trapped in this windmill!" then not only is there a 3-second side-band it's actually carrying information

Yes. A low enough data rate can be hidden under an audio channel.

Did you know that the LF transmissions by the BBC were (are?) used to carry a very low data rate signal by frequency modulation of the 198kHz sound programme. The coverage of Radio Data is the whole of the UK, more or less and the only place you can hear it is is the mush area between the main transmitter and the two fill-ins in Scotland.

The system used is better than Morse Code but the ideas the same.

 

[Averagesupernova]

If the original question is more-or-less, "How does an AM receiver distinguish between modulation versus carrier attenuation," and the answer is, "it can't," that comports with the idea that all changes to carrier amplitude will be interpreted as "modulation". So I'm actually less confused!

I think you are more confused. Take an AM station that is perfectly quiet. It's only transmitting a carrier. Now add modulation. The average power transmitted as well as received will increase. If you have a baseline to go by, you will find you can tell the difference. Suppose atmospheric conditions cause the received power of a steady carrier to drop. Until you wait for it to go up again (even higher than previously to satisfy the requirement that with modulation average power increases) you cannot tell if it was intentional as part of modulation or not. My whole point in staying in this discussion is that I'm not sure you really understand what AM really is in it's entirety. Btw, not saying I'm an expert, but I get the feeling you are missing a few things.

 

[Tom.G]

The average power transmitted as well as received will increase.

Hmm... I don't think I've noticed the S-meter going up when modulation comes on.

It's been a long time though, have I perhaps not been observant enough?

 

[DaveE]

Take an AM station that is perfectly quiet. It's only transmitting a carrier. Now add modulation. The average power transmitted as well as received will increase.

So suppose we are transmitting at 500KHz and modulating with a 10KHz sine wave. What you are saying implies there is more power in $sin(2\pi⋅10^4⋅t)⋅sin(2\pi⋅5⋅10^5⋅t)$ than just $sin(2\pi⋅5⋅10^5⋅t)$. Are you sure about that?

 

[sophiecentaur]

Hmm... I don't think I've noticed the S-meter going up when modulation comes on.

It's been a long time though, have I perhaps not been observant enough?

The power for the modulation comes from the Audio source for a ‘proper’ amplitude modulator. The envelope goes above and below the mean carrier level.
The S meter will be low pass filtered to eliminate the envelope and shouldn’t twitch unless the mean power changes.
@DaveE the lower graph shows Suppressed Carrier AM and not AM. Add the two graphs together and you get proper AM (with a constant level of carrier).
i can’t easily find a link at the moment but just look at wiki for the right maths and graphs.

Note: AM is not just multiplication.

 

[tech99]

My understanding is that for an AM transmission with 100% modulation, the power in the sidebands is half that in the carrier. I would therefore expect the total power to increase by 50% when modulation is applied.

 

[sophiecentaur]

My understanding is that for an AM transmission with 100% modulation, the power in the sidebands is half that in the carrier. I would therefore expect the total power to increase by 50% when modulation is applied.

Correct. Thinking in terms of phasors and single frequency modulation waveform. There is a carrier vector and two half length phasors, rotating clock and anti clockwise. That's two quarter powers, giving half power in the sidebands, which corresponds to a second, big sweaty power valve for the modulation.

 

[Silly Questions]

Any "minimum frequency" would seem to exist only relative to whether the analyzer can observe at least two events.

I think you are more confused ... Until you wait for it to go up again ...

The "second event' in question would be the power going back up, so in this case perhaps not more confused. The power needing to exceed a certain threshold to count as "modulation" is entirely new information, however, so I did learn something.

(even higher than previously to satisfy the requirement you cannot tell if it was intentional as part of modulation or not.

Is this a case of analysis versus simple reaction? What a human thinks when looking at the analyzer has very little to do with what an AM receiver scores as "modulation".
As I understand an AM receiver thinks every change is "modulation" whether the peak meets the threshold of "true modulation" or not.
Yet I can see that whether a rising and falling signal represents "true modulation" is of critical importance to for instance analyzing the nature of interstellar emissions caught on radiotelescope.
Just to make sure I'm straight on this, an AM receiver will pass to the output every click, buzz, or whine whether or not the sideband peaks exceed the threshold for "true modulation"?

I get the feeling you are missing a few things.

That almost certainly remains true.

Did you know that the LF transmissions by the BBC were (are?) used to carry a very low data rate signal

So in Britain even the radios have a silly walk! Is there a code for, "And now for something completely different?"

 

[Averagesupernova]

@Silly Questions try thinking in the frequency domain. As I said before, anything done to a sinewave will create new frequencies (sidebands). Try not to think of the amplitude of the carrier changing. If there is a signal (single frequency) that drops into a channel of am AM station it will show up as a tone in the audio output of the receiver.
Example: Suppose there is a station broadcasting a program on 1 MHz in the AM band. Now suppose your neighbor is an electronics experimentor who's latest project generates a single frequency of 1.000800 MHz and this frequency escapes the laboratory workbench by more than a small amount. Your receiver which is tuned to 1 MHz suddenly has a 800 Hertz tone in the middle of the program you were listening to. You speak of 'change' and 'threshold of true modulation', and I'm not really sure what you mean. Threshold of modulation to me isn't even a thing.
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Bottom line is this: The AM receiver gets the audio signal back by intermodulating the carrier with ANY other signal in the passband.
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It's like the chicken and the egg. We can attempt to change the carrier level at a certain rate and what actually happens in the spectrum is the carrier remains unchanged and we end up with new frequencies. Or, we simply add several signals together in correct proportions and when we look at the composite on a scope it certainly looks like the AM envelope we all recognize. Quite the rabbit hole isn't it?

 

[tech99]

It was thought by some scientists, when the concept of side frequencies was proposed by Carson in the '20s, that the they were merely a mathematical construct and did not actually exist. However, the imminent introduction of single sideband working for the first UK-USA telephone service (using Long Wave) proved them wrong.

 

[sophiecentaur]

merely a mathematical construct and did not actually exist.

Without the experimental equipment then no one could be 100% sure about the equivalence between time and frequency domains but, after the triode valve was invented in 1906, I would have thought that spectrum analysis of a (albeit very low frequency carrier) DSB AM signal would have been very possible long before 1920.

You'd have only needed to demonstrate the time / frequency thing once for the whole of the theory which Fourier proposed in 1807 to be justified (and it survives, pretty much unchanged today). Those 1920's 'nay sayers' would have been a bit late to the party, I think.

 

[sophiecentaur]

As I understand an AM receiver thinks every change is "modulation" whether the peak meets the threshold of "true modulation" or not.

Electronic equipment doesn't 'think' anything. Whether or not there is anything there that makes sense (the signal - not my writing) would have to depend on how the output signal from a demodulator (of any kind) is analysed after the receiver.

Deciding whether a signal is carrying any information other than random noise can be a hard job. But the information about the way the comms channel is varying can be at a fraction of a Hz and be detectable even when way down in the stash. That would still be "true modulation"

 

[tech99]

I don't think people realize the extreme difficulty of doing electronic measurements of any sort in 1920. The idea of mixers only arrived in 1918. Amplifiers with gain and stability were a problem, power supplies were really difficult. Oscillators were mysterious and unstable. There were no oscilloscopes in general use, no signal generators and of course no frequency counters or spectrum analysers. Components tended to me made for a purpose, not to a value. So for instance, grid leak resistor, decoupling capacitor or smoothing capacitor. It was the use of SSB for radio telephony, then for carrier line systems, which gave the push needed.

 

[sophiecentaur]

I don't think people realize the extreme difficulty of doing electronic measurements of any sort in 1920. The idea of mixers only arrived in 1918. Amplifiers with gain and stability were a problem, power supplies were really difficult. Oscillators were mysterious and unstable. There were no oscilloscopes in general use, no signal generators and of course no frequency counters or spectrum analysers. Components tended to me made for a purpose, not to a value. So for instance, grid leak resistor, decoupling capacitor or smoothing capacitor. It was the use of SSB for radio telephony, then for carrier line systems, which gave the push needed.

Interesting points which put it all into context. For spectrum analysis I was thinking in terms of a very simple TRF receiver which could Jane a crazy narrow bandwidth but not as trivial as I was thinking, I guess.

To be the first to do spectrum analysis would have been quite a spur. But maybe TRF wasn’t thought of at the time and making your own components?? I think I would have stuck to fretwork and turning chair legs.

 

[Tom.G]

The power for the modulation comes from the Audio source for a ‘proper’ amplitude modulator. The envelope goes above and below the mean carrier level.

I can see that for a Plate modulated stage. What happens in a Grid modulated stage?

 

[sophiecentaur]

I can see that for a Plate modulated stage. What happens in a Grid modulated stage?

Dunno. You’d have to look it up. The signal into the grid would need to have carrier and mod on it (?). I never made an AM Tx with valves but it sounds like a way to avoid some of the extra cost of an Anode modulated version. Swings and roundabouts.

 

[Tom.G]

Ahh... Just found it in the Radio Amateur's Handbook, published by ARRL (American Radio Relay League), 1969, pgs 241, 242.

Use a Pentode Tetrode with RF drive to the control grid and modulation to the screen grid. DC bias the screen grid at one-half that recommended for CW operation.

The audio power required for 100% modulation is approximately one-fourth the DC power input to the screen for CW operation.

Just as a side comment, there at least used to be dual-gate transistors, possibly for a similar approach.

Cheers,
Tom

 

[sophiecentaur]

Just found it in the Radio Amateur's Handbook,

The point about 'Broadcast' AM sound is that efficiency is very relevant. I don't know about multi grid valves and whether they can be driven in Class C (probably not, by definition) but a 100kW transmitter valve needs to use Class C and the only way (??) to do that is to have it driven to saturation every cycle. As it happens, that does just the right thing for efficiency because only a modulation valve needs to be class A (or a push pull pair plus audio transformer can do Class B).

A transmitter for FM is easier to achieve because it can have a Class C output and the carrier frequency can be modulated easily. The only snag is that a good demodulator (for Wideband FM) is much more complicated. I remember the endless stream of alternative designs for FM demodulators which appeared in 'The Mags' as more and more integrated circuits were introduced. Enthusiasts must have had shelves full of such projects. (Too busy to actually listen to the wireless.)

 

[Silly Questions]

You speak of 'change' and 'threshold of true modulation', and I'm not really sure what you mean.

I synthesized your statement, "... the requirement that with modulation average power increases ..." into the idea of a "threshold of true modulation", the idea being that if your stated requirement isn't met the threshold of true modulation isn't met. Judging from the reaction I seem to have overreached?

On the topic of "non-linear" inputs raised by Sophie Centaur I think I understand this to mean that the encoded lower-frequency signal doesn't actually mathematically exist as a nice smooth continuous-function wave but a chopped-up series of points on peaks that need to be reconstituted into a wave via engineered apparatus (even if merely per Tech99 an earpiece with the right mechanical inertia). I haven't quite synthesized this with the idea that any modulation of the carrier produces side-bands, but I'll get there.

Is it accurate to say that the low-pass filter will filter out but still be distorted by extraneous side-bands created by sources of modulation outside of the engineered system (ie windmill blades or passing delivery trucks carrying lots of things made of varying lengths of metal)? And conversely to count delivery trucks or measure windmill RPM you could use a different (even lower) low-pass filter, and the radio programme would be filtered out but still slightly distort the amplitude of the "pops" signifying passing blades or trucks?

 

[sophiecentaur]

@Silly Questions your model of carrier plus side bands only applies strictly to basic AM. Even the ‘next one up’, FM only sometimes has an identifiable carrier frequency component. The transmitted signal is just a varying voltage at the receiver input. Many demodulators will extract the information with a locally generated signal (local oscillator). FM mostly doesn’t care what the ‘carrier’ or ‘rest frequency’ is. It just has a spectrum which the discriminator output as a continuous baseband signal.

Any higher forms of modulation are capable of dealing with noise spikes with error detection (muting on an error) or error correction (using surplus capacity to detect an error and put in a ‘good’ sample. There is no simple way to relate this to Signal to Noise Ratio. A good sound or vision system will hang in until the errors get too obvious an then mute / freeze.

Think in terms of trying to read a mud splattered newspaper page. You can often get the message when most of the text is obliterated. ‘Carrier to Noise’ would be hard to quantify there.

 

[Silly Questions]

FM mostly doesn’t care what the ‘carrier’ or ‘rest frequency’ is. It just has a spectrum which the discriminator output as a continuous baseband signal.

Right, this was what led me to ask about what I've learned is called "modulation index distortion", when the receiver's reference frequency drifts from the actual frequency then is suddenly jerked back into alignment. The actual example Tech99 gave was a lot more subtle, a straight DC voltage encoded so that the modulation index is compressed in one direction and amplified in the other.

I hope I understand this effect as well as I think I do, because I thought I had a pretty good bead on it after Tech99 weighed in.

You might be saying something else, that theoretically an FM transmitter could drift constantly, never actually having a "base frequency", but if the drift were slow enough all the receivers would work fine. That idea makes sense to me, but I don't know if it was actually related to what you were trying to say.

 

[sophiecentaur]

The Mod index distortion you describe will demodulate to give a waveform resembling an even order non linearity but the whole FM thing is much more complicated than that.
Have you a particular interest in that mechanism or was it just a random notion?

 

[Silly Questions]

I had a burning curiosity from the time I read the theory about what would happen if the receiver carrier drifted off the transmitter carrier, which seemed theoretically possible in certain edge cases. Then Tech99 explained it all, using the edgiest of all edge cases, a constant fed into the signal. He also suggested this is not desirable and described methods for not feeding a constant into your frequency-modulated signal.

If I'm getting something wrong I'm very interested in getting it right, otherwise I'm more-or-less satisfied I understand modulation index distortion. I am wondering though regarding "even-order non-linearity" what "even-order" means in this context?

My main interest is radio and radar in WWII, but that's a very long-term learning project. To understand the engineering iterations that brought radar from Tizzard's briefcase to Blackett Strait learning more radio theory couldn't hurt.

 

[sophiecentaur]

I still don't know where you got this "Mod Index distortion" from and what is of particular interest about it to you. There are all sorts of channel distortions that can affect the FM signal. Asymmetrical filtering can add phase distortion, multi path propagation can result in Amplitude modulation of the transmitted FM signal ( the basis of the first RADAR systems).
You need to understand that FM is effectively an 'AC coupled channel where the notional carrier frequency (corresponding to Zero Volts of the input modulating signal) is irrelevant. So much so that, when Analogue TV is sent on an FM link, the zero V DC video voltage is 'clamped' every line to follow any drift in the discriminator, modulator or IF mixing up and down to the link frequency on the way.
You really need to brush up on the formal basics of FM before exploring the more esoteric bits. It's too hard for an arm waving approach.

 

[Silly Questions]

I learned about modulation index distortion from Tech99. It's the very first conversation in this thread.

In the example he gave he demonstrates how constants in FM broadcasts need special encoding techniques. If you simply drop a constant onto an FM signal the receiver won't extract it; instead, the constant shifts the reference frequency and distorts the modulation index.

"The notional carrier frequency is irrelevant" is exactly the problem. In your example of clamping the video voltage at set intervals, what exactly is the transmitter sending around this time? If the transmitter sends an unmodulated carrier at that interval wouldn't that recalibrate the receivers? If you don't want distortion it seems like you'd have to contrive a way to make the notional carrier frequency relevant, as your example might suggest.

Why do I not know about other problems with FM? The peril of asymmetrical filtering isn't intuitively obvious to a beginner reading an FM theory book, sorting that question into the category of, "Didn't know to ask." The theory book I read didn't talk about how things might go wrong.

The only category of potential problems I could see for myself went mostly like this: If you had a monitor attached to the transmitter which perfectly subtracted the reference frequency and compared it to the output of an FM receiver of the on-air transmission, the difference in outputs between the two would be what, and under what circumstances would that difference be greatest?

 

[Averagesupernova]

@Silly Questions you seem to have a way to complicate your questions. Please take no offense but I find it difficult to 'decode' your questions. Sometimes I think that you are not grasping that there are standards set in transmitting systems. In the video example, there is never an unmodulated carrier. When there is no information sent, that is only part of the signal. Sync pulses and the color subcarrier reference are still sent. You can't just say I'm going to shut modulation off completely and then have an issue with: "Well NOW what the heck is the TV receiver going to do? The system is failing!"

 

[sophiecentaur]

what exactly is the transmitter sending around this time

This is a typical TV transmission problem. The transmitter just sends the normal TV signal. After demodulation, the TV circuit identifies a portion of the normal line waveform (the 'black level' ) and clamps the (AC coupled) demodulated signal to an internal voltage with a brief connection with a 'switch'. The time constant is long enough for the levels not to drift too far from line to line.
I really think you are cherry picking topics within FM. IMO this is not the best way to get a grasp of FM. Q and A just doesn't work in Engineering.

 

[Silly Questions]

I don't really know anything about analog electronics. FM as a data transmission medium was interesting to me because the "error correction" feedback, which in a normal clock would true the oscillator to the crystal, is where the data pops out. I speculated that might sometimes cause problems.

My original line of inquiry was how computer clocks work, then how PLL's work, then how the first PLL's (or PLL-equivalents) made FM radio possible. It's been an interesting ride.

 

[sophiecentaur]

Why do I not know about other problems with FM? The peril of asymmetrical filtering isn't intuitively obvious to a beginner reading an FM theory book, sorting that question into the category of, "Didn't know to ask." The theory book I read didn't talk about how things might go wrong.

I re-read this para and I see that you are not really aware of what Frequency Modulation is actually doing. Your question is definitely trying to run b before you can walk. (Very risky)

In an arm waving way we can liken FM to wobbling the frequency control knob on a lab oscillator in step with the voltage variations of the input signal. Not wrong - but it misses the essence of what's happening and the consequences of that form of modulation.

If you had a monitor attached to the transmitter which perfectly subtracted the reference frequency and compared it to the output of an FM receiver of the on-air transmission, the difference in outputs between the two would be what,

This passage is actually meaningless. What do you mean by "subtract the reference frequency"? In a wide deviation system, like FM radio the "reference frequency" is no more relevant to the transmitted signal than a frequency that's 1kHz above or below. If, by subtracting, you mean use a narrow filter at the nominal carrier frequency then all that would do is to reduce the transmitted power a bit, each time the carrier sweeps through that 'notch'. Basic FM is fairly tolerant to that sort of nasty. FM is very different from basic AM because in AM, the carrier is an essential part of the signal (a reference) and it's there all the time, carrying its Amplitude Envelope. As I have said before, often (for simple sinusoidal modulation at a particular frequency) there is no frequency component at the notional carrier at all.

It might help if you realize that Frequency Modulation is a sub-set of Phase Modulation that's not coherent - i.e. there is no reference carrier involved. However FM is demodulated, the demodulator output has no definite zero or origin.
OTOH, phase modulation can be demodulated coherently and there is an implied reference carrier frequency and phase from beginning to end.

Remember:
Phase is the Integral of Frequency (Imagine the angle of a wheel turning clockwise and anticlockwise along with a modulating signal.)
And Frequency is the time differential (rate of change) of Phase.

You can measure the Frequency without any knowledge of a reference phase and, as we know, when we do an indefinite Integration, the answer involves an arbitrary constant. For FM radio we don't care about that constant.

 

[sophiecentaur]

then how the first PLL's (or PLL-equivalents) made FM radio possible.

Nonsense, I'm afraid. The first FM demodulators used the slope of the frequency response of a simple tuned circuit to show the frequency received by the amplitude of what came out. PLLs came along decades after the first FM broadcasts. Iirc, actually the original FSK used two tuned filters to identify when the signal was at the higher frequency or the lower frequency. We're talking Valve circuits and hand wound inductors etc!

You must try to avoid being too fanciful about a topic that's very complicated and needs a very formal approach. Alternatively just work in terms of 'black boxes' with their functions marked on the side and leave it at that (a pragmatic approach).

 

[Silly Questions]

I'll take your advice. You've given me a lot to think about.