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259 points zdw | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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pkolaczk ◴[] No.41835074[source]
I don’t buy this explanation. The FM modulation uses a much higher bandwidth than AM. The distance between channels on FM radio is 200 kHz compared to only 9 kHz on AM. That’s more than 20x more bandwidth for FM. On AM, no matter how deeply you modulate the carrier, the bandwidth will not exceed twice the bandwidth of the input signal. On FM, the deeper you modulate it, the wider the output spectrum will be, and it can easily exceed the bandwidth of the input signal.

In addition to that, the whole FM band is much higher frequency, while I guess quite a lot of noise, especially burst noise caused by eg thunderstorms is relatively low frequency. So it’s not picked up because it’s out of band.

Any noise that falls inside the channel does get picked up by the receiver regardless of modulation. However because the available bandwidth is so much higher than the real bandwidth of the useful signal, there is actually way more information redundancy in FM encoding, so this allows to remove random noise as it will likely cancel out.

If I encoded the same signal onto 20 separate AM channels and then averaged the output from all of them (or better - use median filter) that would cancel most of random noise just as well.

Also another thing with modulation might be that if there is any narrow-band non-white noise happening to fall inside the channel (eg a distant sender on colliding frequency), on AM it will be translated as-is to the audible band and you’ll hear it as a single tone. On FM demodulation it will be spread across the whole output signal spectrum, so it will be perceived quieter and nicer by human ear, even if its total energy is the same. That’s why AM does those funny sounds when tuning, but FM does not.

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xd1936 ◴[] No.41837049[source]
Going back to first principles, modulating the frequency instead of the amplitude inherently makes the system less lossy. Imagine you were communicating with someone miles away on a hilltop, and they had a lot of data to convey. Would you find it easier to distinguish signal vs. noise if the light was increasing and decreasing rapidly in brightness (AM) or color (FM)?
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1. pkolaczk ◴[] No.41839663[source]
If you AM modulate the carrier f0 by a single tone f1, you get a spectrum with only three tones: f0 - f1, f0, f0 + f1. If you FM modulate it, well the thing gets much more complex - depending on the depth of modulation you can get a much wider spectrum than from f0-f1 to f0+f1. So it is hard to compare. Your FM modulated signal may indeed be more resilient to noise but will require wider channel to be properly transmitted.

I haven’t seen a convincing explanation if FM would be really that better than AM if both were given exactly the same channel width.