Modulation |
In electronics, modulation is the process of varying one or more properties of a high-frequency periodic waveform, called the carrier signal, with a modulating signal which typically contains information to be transmitted.
In telecommunications, modulation is the process of conveying a message signal, for example a digital bit stream or an analog audio signal, inside another signal that can be physically transmitted. Modulation of a sine waveform is used to transform a baseband message signal into a passband signal, for example low-frequency audio signal into a radio-frequency signal (RF signal). In radio communications, cable TV systems or the public switched telephone network for instance, electrical signals can only be transferred over a limited passband frequency spectrum, with specific (non-zero) lower and upper cutoff frequencies. Modulating a sine-wave carrier makes it possible to keep the frequency content of the transferred signal as close as possible to the centre frequency (typically the carrier frequency) of the passband.A device that performs modulation is known as a modulator and a device that performs the inverse operation of modulation is known as a demodulator (sometimes detector or demod). A device that can do both operations is a modem (modulator–demodulator).
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