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Analog Communications

Unit 8
Lecture Notes 58
Pulse-amplitude modulation (Pam)

This, the simplest form of pulse modulation, is illustrated in Fig1. It forms an excellent
introduction to pulse modulation in general. PAM is a pulse modulation system in which
the signal is sampled at regular intervals, and each sample is made proportional to the
amplitude of the signal at the instant of sampling. The pulses are then either sent by
wire/cable, or else used to modulate a carrier. As is shown in Fig 1.b, the two types are
double-polarity PAM, which is self-explanatory, and single-polarity PAM, in which a
fixed dc level is added to the signal, to ensure that the pulses are always positive. As will
be seen shortly, the ability to use constant-amplitude pulses is a major advantage of pulse
modulation. Since this is certainly not the case here, PAM is not used very often. When it
is used, the pulses are made to frequency-modulate the carrier.

Fig 1a) message signal

Fig 1b) double-polarity PAM signal
Fig 1 c) single-polarity PAM signal
It is very easy to generate or demodulate PAM. In a generator, the signal to be converted
to PAM is fed to one input of an AND gate. Pulses at the sampling frequency are applied
T. Kalpana,ECE,GMRIT

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Analog Communications

Unit 8
Lecture Notes 58

to the other input of the And gate, to open it during the wanted time intervals. The output
of the gate then consists of pulses at the sampling rate, equal in amplitude to the signal
voltage at each instant. The pulses are then passed through a pulse-shaping network,
which gives them flat tops. As mentioned above, frequency modulation is then employed,
so that the system becomes PAM-FM. In the receiver, the pulses are first recovered with
a standard FM demodulator. They are then fed to an ordinary diode detector, which is
followed by a low-pass filter. IF the cutoff frequency of this filter is high enough to pass
the highest signal frequency, but low enough to remove the sampling frequency ripple, an
undistorted replica of the original signal is thus produced.

Pulse-time modulation(PTM) Im PTM the signal is sampled as before, but the pulses
indicating instantaneous sample amplitudes themselves all have a constant amplitude.
However, one of their timing characteristics is varied, being made proportional to the
sampled signal amplitude at that instant. The variable characteristic may be the width,
position or frequency of the pulses, so that three different types of PTM are possible. The
first two will now be treated in turn, whereas pulse-frequency modulation has no
significant practical applications, and so it will be omitted. It should be noted that all
forms of PTM have the same advantages over PAM as frequency modulation has over
amplitude modulation. In all of them the pulse amplitude remains constant, so that
amplitude limiters can be used to provide a good degree of noise immunity.

Sampling theorem This states that, if the sampling rate in any pulse modulation system
exceeds twice the maximum signal frequency, the original signal can be reconstructed in
the receiver with vanishingly small distortion. The sampling theorem is used in practice
to determine minimum sampling speeds. Consider pulse modulation used for speech.
Transmission is generally over standard telephone channels, so that the audio frequency
range is 300 to 3400 Hz. For this application, a sampling rate of 8000 samples per second
is almost a worldwide standard by now,. This pulse rate is, as can be seen, comfortably
more than twice the highest audio frequency. The sampling theorem is satisfied, and the
resulting system is free from sampling error.
T. Kalpana,ECE,GMRIT

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