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hpr4291 :: AM on the Nyquist Prompt

Lee experiments with amplitude modulation and learns lisp in the process

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Hosted by Lee on Monday, 2025-01-13 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
lisp, nyquist, radio. 2.

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Duration: 00:12:35

HAM radio.

A series about all things Amateur Radio/HAM Radio.

Studying for a license from the Radio Society of Great Britain lead to an interesting experiment.

What happens if one sine wave is modulated with another sine wave? Similar to sending a pure tone over AM radio.

Apparently the result is two frequencies, one equal to the difference of the two original frequencies and one equal to the sum.

Creating two tones and multiplying them in Nyquist Prompt in Audacity then plotting the resulting spectrum concurs.

(mult (sound (hzosc 1000)) (sound (hzosc 500)))

The original tones were 1 kHz and 0.5 kHz.

The result was a peak at 0.5 kHz (the difference) and one at 1.5 kHz (the sum).

Audacity

On another note, the manual mentions in practice if one of the tones is the carrier frequency and one of them is the signal, then the carrier should not be modulated all the way down to zero or all the way up to maximum. This avoids distortion and clipping so the quality is better when received. It is also more power efficient so the transmission can travel further given the transmitter has a limited power output.


Comments

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Comment #1 posted on 2025-01-11 10:18:25 by Ken Fallon

New Ham you say

Did I hear that you're going for the exam ?

Great show and it explained a lot to me about visualization of wave forms.

More of this type of thing

Comment #2 posted on 2025-01-13 11:40:18 by paulj

Thank you!

Hi Lee,

Great idea to use Audacity to create the visualisation!

I have been playing with the frequencies in the Nyquist prompt, and like the appearance of the data displayed when using :
(mult (sound (hzosc 10000)) (sound (hzosc 200)))
This shows the envelope effect very clearly. I guess with the frequency differences seen in radio transmitters/receivers, this is even more pronounced, but I haven't tried to load those values in!

My other comment: beware (enjoy) the functional programming rabbit hole. I stared with Clojure, then moved to Common Lisp, and more recently Scheme (Guile), as well as using emacs-lisp throughout. My use of the latter has improved significantly since I learned from the other functional languages.

Thanks for the show!
--
Paul

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