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Mainly f.m. receivers are of the superhetrodyne variety. Before we go into any depth about f.m. radio receivers let's consider the principal differences between a.m. and f.m. signals. At first glance it might seem I am merely stating the blinding obvious but the differences are indeed quite profound. BACKGROUND TO FM RECEIVER DESIGN An a.m. receiver relies upon the original carrier signal (station frequency) having been amplitude modulated. This means the original amplitude (strength) varies at an audio rate. Looking at figure 1 we can see an unmodulated carrier signal as it might be seen on an oscilloscope.
fluorescent lighting, your computer or atmospheric noise such as a distant storm. Note the blue lines extend beyond the amplitude envelope, they could be many times the magnitude of the received signal.
Nearly everyone has experienced static crashes through an a.m. radio when nearby lightning strikes.
For these reasons frequency modulation evolved. Instead of varying the amplitude of the carrier signal, which remains constant, we vary the carrier frequency more or less by the audio frequency. If a carrier signal is frequency modulated (fm) it looks like one below in figure 4
Unfortunately the diagram is quite congested because I had to fit it in a space 620 pixels wide. Now the priciple differences between an f.m. radio versus an a.m. radio, and here for the moment we are talking about the entertainment variety, are: (a) the need for VHF reception capability 88 - 108 MHz as against 0.54 - 1.65 Mhz for a.m. reception. (b) the need for limiting action in the I.F. stages (see later discussion) (c) a different means of detection of the audio i.e., recovering the frequency modulation. (d) if we are talking f.m. stereo reception then some means of recovering left and right channel information.
Naturally we don't put a normal a.m. signal through a limiter, this is usually only done with f.m. signals. I simply provided figure 5 above so you could get the general idea. You should notice that all the amplitude modulation information (including noise) is progressively being removed. BTW 5(b) and (c) were simply done graphically by taking (a) resizing the height by 150% and cutting off the excess height (top and bottom) and repeating that exercise for (c). This is exactly what happens in a limiter only to a much greater amplification!. To give you some idea of the amplification required for proper limiting go back to the old vacuum tube days where a good a.m. - i.f. amplifier might contain three vacuum tubes. In the same period a good f.m. receiver may have had twelve or more tubes in the i.f./limiter stage.
MEANS OF DETECTION A number of f.m. detection schemes have evolved over the years. The principal discrete ones were: (a) F.M. Discriminator (figure 6)