Digital demodulators for analog signals: comparative analysis and simulation
Abstract The paper examines digital demodulators for two commonly used techniques of modulating analog signals: amplitude modulation (AM) and frequency modulation (FM). The described demodulators can be used to perform the radio monitoring of narrowband signal ranges including FM broadcasting stations as well as license-free CB, LPD, PMR bands. The demodulators considered in this work are intended for programmable devices with limited memory and computing resources, for example, for STM32F407 microcontrollers and similar ones. The paper presents the analysis and simulation of demodulators for AM signals, FM signals with low modulation indices and for FM signals without restriction on the modulation indices. In addition, the authors demonstrate how to demodulate the phase-modulation signal using a quadrature demodulator. The number of operations that are available for demodulation is limited by IF multiplication and filtering. The simulation of the analyzed demodulation algorithms was carried out in the Scilab environment which is a free analogue of the Matlab environment. To explain the principle of operation of demodulators, block diagrams and graphs of signals in time and frequency domains are shown.