If you shine a flashlight through a tree blowing in the wind and vary the brightness to convey information, the signal can get distorted pretty easily.
However, if you have a constant brightness source and vary the color, it’s a lot easier to figure out what the source is trying to convey.
What I don't see is how it explains why one would work better than the other.
If the tree is blowing in the wind, and a leaf obstructs the entire signal, it doesn't matter whether it's a change in brightness, or a change in color. Either way, that information is lost by the blocked leaf. And if the entire signal is not lost, perhaps many leaves may have blocked the signal but some signal managed to get through, it doesn't matter whether the signal change was a change in brightness, or a change in color. Either way you're going to notice the change. So I don't see how this clarifies why FM is better. What am I missing?
I see from the article that "noise tends to be a an unwanted amplitude modulation, not a frequency modulation." In other words, the tree is providing an unwanted change in brightness. It never provides an unwanted change in color.
I guess the tree is able to dim the signal so much that it appears to be a deliberate signal change? Couldn't this be dealt with if you know the details of the tree's dimming ability?
And even if leaves do sometimes block the entire signal, you're still going to do better with varying the color than the brightness.
For this, it's better to stick to many leaves - the analogy holds up well here because when is the brightness change due to the number of leaves being in the way vs the source changing its brightness?
The tree blowing in the wind will introduce its own amplitude (brightness) fluctuations. It will be hard for you to tell which amplitude changes are signal from the source and which are noise from the tree.
Edit: Looks like you answered yourself while I typed that, where you added:
> Couldn't this be dealt with if you know the details of the tree's dimming ability?
If the tree is moving, and you’re far enough away to resolve individual leaves (which is not unreasonable) then its “dimming ability” is constantly changing.
I'm unsure of what the correct terminology would be, but (for my linear algebra brain) you could say something like, for FM the noise dimension is orthogonal to the signal dimension, while for AM the noise and signal dimensions are the same. Therefore for FM any change in amplitude in the noise dimension should be mostly isolated from the signal dimension, while it is essentially impossible to tell what is noise and what is signal for AM - you could probably do some radio equivalent of a differential pair in order to detect noise and remove it, but then why would you bother when FM has improved noise rejection anyway.
of course, you shouldnt be listening to radio during a tornado, but...
An AM receiver is a machine that senses the amplitude at a specific em frequency. In this situation, noise and interference become random additions or subtractions to that amplitude. Draw a sine wave, then go over the line with vertical ticks or scribbles. Now imagine taking a random sampling of points and reconstructing the original wave perfectly (without a computer). Most of the information is just gone and you end up with a noisy output wave.
Now an FM receiver is one that measures frequency changes above and below a 'carrier' frequency. The amount of deviation away from center represents the amplitude of the sound signal being transmitted. In this setup, noise and interference are also random additions to the amplitude, but also at random frequencies. On average, interference happens evenly over the entire range of frequencies you're looking at. That means that the highest amplitude is still the same frequency away from center, it just has a slightly different amplitude.
Go back to that sine wave. You can't see the original signal behind all the noise, but you can still see how far apart the peaks are. You can still easily extract its frequency content.
FM uses the frequency dimension to transmit data because random noise can't really affect frequency. Noise mostly happens in the amplitude dimension across all frequencies at the same time.
FM is more robust because it uses two dimensions to encode information vs AM's single dimension. That's also why FM is in stereo!
Of course it does. Real-life objects aren't perfectly opaque or transparent. Similarly, radio waves aren't blocked or received: they're mangled and self-interacted in complex ways.
Fair enough, this might be a sensory artefact. In this case, however, nature had a point. Energy scales proportionally with frequency but exponentially with amplitude. Increasing amplitude delivers more bang than increasing frequency.
Stereo FM is essentially two waves transmitted at the same time (it's common and difference instead of left and right, but that's math). Stereo AM would be possible, it was never done because two different AM transmissions have to be spaced further away than FM.
The conceptually simplest of course whas where the LSB and USB are used as separate channels.
Although most of the systems did work, they were not ultimately successful simply because insufficient stereo receivers reached the market.
Go search in Wikipedia on "AM Stereo".
It works, but it is a fairly expensive method to implement.
Wikipedia says that there was basically one station doing ISB stereo; which I guess is close enough to "nobody did it", but not quite "it was never done".