Phase Modulation - Theory

Theory

PM changes the phase angle of the complex envelope in direct proportion to the message signal.

Suppose that the signal to be sent (called the modulating or message signal) is and the carrier onto which the signal is to be modulated is

Annotated:

carrier(time) = (carrier amplitude)*sin(carrier frequency*time + phase shift)

This makes the modulated signal

This shows how modulates the phase - the greater m(t) is at a point in time, the greater the phase shift of the modulated signal at that point. It can also be viewed as a change of the frequency of the carrier signal, and phase modulation can thus be considered a special case of FM in which the carrier frequency modulation is given by the time derivative of the phase modulation.

The mathematics of the spectral behavior reveals that there are two regions of particular interest:

  • For small amplitude signals, PM is similar to amplitude modulation (AM) and exhibits its unfortunate doubling of baseband bandwidth and poor efficiency.
  • For a single large sinusoidal signal, PM is similar to FM, and its bandwidth is approximately
,
where and is the modulation index defined below. This is also known as Carson's Rule for PM.

Read more about this topic:  Phase Modulation

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