Electronic Filter Design Handbook 4th Ed.pdf
In radio communications, a radio receiver, also known as a receiver, a wireless, or simply a radio, is an electronic device that receives radio waves and converts the information carried by them to a usable form. It is used with an antenna. The antenna intercepts radio waves (electromagnetic waves of radio frequency) and converts them to tiny alternating currents which are applied to the receiver, and the receiver extracts the desired information. The receiver uses electronic filters to separate the desired radio frequency signal from all the other signals picked up by the antenna, an electronic amplifier to increase the power of the signal for further processing, and finally recovers the desired information through demodulation.
Electronic Filter Design Handbook 4th Ed.pdf
Receivers usually have several stages of amplification: the radio signal from the bandpass filter is amplified to make it powerful enough to drive the demodulator, then the audio signal from the demodulator is amplified to make it powerful enough to operate the speaker. The degree of amplification of a radio receiver is measured by a parameter called its sensitivity, which is the minimum signal strength of a station at the antenna, measured in microvolts, necessary to receive the signal clearly, with a certain signal-to-noise ratio. Since it is easy to amplify a signal to any desired degree, the limit to the sensitivity of many modern receivers is not the degree of amplification but random electronic noise present in the circuit, which can drown out a weak radio signal.
The RF filter on the front end of the receiver is needed to prevent interference from any radio signals at the image frequency. Without an input filter the receiver can receive incoming RF signals at two different frequencies,.[18][13][17][19] The receiver can be designed to receive on either of these two frequencies; if the receiver is designed to receive on one, any other radio station or radio noise on the other frequency may pass through and interfere with the desired signal. A single tunable RF filter stage rejects the image frequency; since these are relatively far from the desired frequency, a simple filter provides adequate rejection. Rejection of interfering signals much closer in frequency to the desired signal is handled by the multiple sharply-tuned stages of the intermediate frequency amplifiers, which do not need to change their tuning.[13] This filter does not need great selectivity, but as the receiver is tuned to different frequencies it must "track" in tandem with the local oscillator. The RF filter also serves to limit the bandwidth applied to the RF amplifier, preventing it from being overloaded by strong out-of-band signals.
Today the TRF design is used in a few integrated (IC) receiver chips. From the standpoint of modern receivers the disadvantage of the TRF is that the gain and bandwidth of the tuned RF stages are not constant but vary as the receiver is tuned to different frequencies.[132] Since the bandwidth of a filter with a given Q is proportional to the frequency, as the receiver is tuned to higher frequencies its bandwidth increases.[14][18] 041b061a72