Concept

Radio receiver design

Summary
Radio receiver design includes the electronic design of different components of a radio receiver which processes the radio frequency signal from an antenna in order to produce usable information such as audio. The complexity of a modern receiver and the possible range of circuitry and methods employed are more generally covered in electronics and communications engineering. The term radio receiver is understood in this article to mean any device which is intended to receive a radio signal in order to generate useful information from the signal, most notably a recreation of the so-called baseband signal (such as audio) which modulated the radio signal at the time of transmission in a communications or broadcast system. Design of a radio receiver must consider several fundamental criteria to produce a practical result. The main criteria are gain, selectivity, sensitivity, and stability. The receiver must contain a detector to recover the information initially impressed on the radio carrier signal, a process called modulation. Gain is required because the signal intercepted by an antenna will have a very low power level, on the order of picowatts or femtowatts. To produce an audible signal in a pair of headphones requires this signal to be amplified a trillion-fold or more. The magnitudes of the required gain are so great that the logarithmic unit decibel is preferred - a gain of 1 trillion times the power is 120 decibels, which is a value achieved by many common receivers. Gain is provided by one or more amplifier stages in a receiver design; some of the gain is applied at the radio-frequency part of the system, and the rest at the frequencies used by the recovered information (audio, video, or data signals). Selectivity is the ability to "tune in" to just one station of the many that may be transmitting at any given time. An adjustable bandpass filter is a typical stage of a receiver. A receiver may include several stages of bandpass filters to provide sufficient selectivity.
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