In the mid-1870s, a form of amplitude modulation—initially called "undulatory currents"—was the first method to successfully produce quality audio over telephone lines. Beginning with Reginald Fessenden's audio demonstrations in 1906, it was also the original method used for audio radio transmissions, and remains in use today by many forms of communication—"AM" is often used to refer to the mediumwave broadcast band (see AM radio).
As originally developed for the electric telephone, amplitude modulation was used to add audio information to the low-powered direct current flowing from a telephone transmitter to a receiver. As a simplified explanation, at the transmitting end, a telephone microphone was used to vary the strength of the transmitted current, according to the frequency and loudness of the sounds received. Then, at the receiving end of the telephone line, the transmitted electrical current affected an electromagnet, which strengthened and weakened in response to the strength of the current. In turn, the electromagnet produced vibrations in the receiver diaphragm, thus closely reproducing the frequency and loudness of the sounds originally heard at the transmitter.
In contrast to the telephone, in radio communication what is modulated is a continuous wave radio signal (carrier wave) produced by a radio transmitter. In its basic form, amplitude modulation produces a signal with power concentrated at the carrier frequency and in two adjacent sidebands. This process is known as heterodyning. Each sideband is equal in bandwidth to that of the modulating signal and is a mirror image of the other. Amplitude modulation that results in two sidebands and a carrier is often called double sideband amplitude modulation (DSB-AM). Amplitude modulation is inefficient in terms of power usage and much of it is wasted. At least two-thirds of the power is concentrated in the carrier signal, which carries no useful information (beyond the fact that a signal is present); the remaining power is split between two identical sidebands, though only one of these is needed since they contain identical information.
To increase transmitter efficiency, the carrier can be removed (suppressed) from the AM signal. This produces a reduced-carrier transmission or double-sideband suppressed-carrier (DSBSC) signal. A suppressed-carrier amplitude modulation scheme is three times more power-efficient than traditional DSB-AM. If the carrier is only partially suppressed, a double-sideband reduced-carrier (DSBRC) signal results. DSBSC and DSBRC signals need their carrier to be regenerated (by a beat frequency oscillator, for instance) to be demodulated using conventional techniques.
Even greater efficiency is achieved—at the expense of increased transmitter and receiver complexity—by completely suppressing both the carrier and one of the sidebands. This is single-sideband modulation, widely used in amateur radio due to its efficient use of both power and bandwidth.
A simple form of AM often used for digital communications is on-off keying, a type of amplitude-shift keying by which binary data is represented as the presence or absence of a carrier wave. This is commonly used at radio frequencies to transmit Morse code, referred to as continuous wave (CW) operation.
Example: double-sideband AM
A carrier wave is modeled as a simple sine wave, such as:
c(t) = C\cdot \sin(\omega_c t + \phi_c),\,
where the radio frequency (in Hz) is given by:
\omega_c / (2\pi).\,
The constants C\, and \phi_c\, represent the carrier amplitude and initial phase, and are introduced for generality. For simplicity however, their respective values can be set to 1 and 0.
Let m(t) represent an arbitrary waveform that is the message to be transmitted. And let the constant M represent its largest magnitude. For instance:
m(t) = M\cdot \cos(\omega_m t + \phi).\,
Thus, the message might be just a simple audio tone of frequency
\omega_m / (2\pi).\,
It is generally assumed that \omega_m \ll \omega_c\, and that \min[ m(t) ] = -M.\,
Then amplitude modulation is created by forming the product:
y(t)\, = [A + m(t)]\cdot c(t),\,
= [A + M\cdot \cos(\omega_m t + \phi)]\cdot \sin(\omega_c t).
A\, represents the carrier amplitude which is a constant that we would choose to demonstrate the modulation index. The values A=1, and M=0.5, produce a y(t) depicted by the graph labelled "50% Modulation" in Figure 4.
For this simple example, y(t) can be trigonometrically manipulated into the following equivalent form:
y(t) = A\cdot \sin(\omega_c t) + \begin{matrix}\frac{M}{2} \end{matrix} \left[\sin((\omega_c + \omega_m) t + \phi) + \sin((\omega_c - \omega_m) t - \phi)\right].\,
Therefore, the modulated signal has three components, a carrier wave and two sinusoidal waves (known as sidebands) whose frequencies are slightly above and below \omega_c.\,
Also notice that the choice A=0 eliminates the carrier component, but leaves the sidebands. That is the DSBSC transmission mode. To generate double-sideband full carrier (A3E), we must choose:
A \ge M.\,
