FM Radio - Talking About The Talk Of The Town

A factor causing much sensation among the teenagers and the young adults irrespective of the social strata, the FM radio stands as the first sign of the huge technological advancements that came up in the latter days and changed radically the landscape of this world, the same way the televisions and the computers did afterwards. To the learned, FM needs no introduction; to the uninitiated, it's just a local radio channel that's always bubbling with peppy programs. But a little technicality regarding the FM Radio and the FM radio waves is not going to hurt much.

Technically speaking, the term radio is used to describe the wireless transmission of signals by varying a carrier wave; thus changing the carrier's amplitude or frequency or phase of electromagnetic waves with frequencies lesser than the frequency of the visual spectrum. Changing systematically and partially the radiated waves thus transmit the information. Upon passing through an electrical conductor, the waves induce an alternating current inside the oscillating fields that are detected and transformed into sound or other information-carrying signals. This is what radio is all about.

The story started in 1933. Edwin H. Armstrong, the inventor of the FM radio patented the idea of using frequency modulation of the radio wave after presenting his paper - "A Method of Reducing Disturbances in Radio Signaling by a System of Frequency Modulation", the first documented account on FM radio. The theory was to minimize the static and other forms of interferences (both natural and artificial) in the radio waves. Four years later, W1XOJ was given the permission for opening the first experimental FM radio station by the FCC. FM radio waves thus made way into the public life full fledged in the 1940s, when standard analog television transmissions took over the entire of North America and Europe, though Germany was only granted a few medium-wave frequencies. Germany, seeing the limitations of the allotted frequencies, began to broadcast on VHF, which made provisions for experimentations with both frequency and amplitude modulation. The experiments proved FM radio a much better alternative and replaced AM for the VHF radio.

For an analog FM radio, the carrier wave varies in a continuous manner, whereas in a digital FM radio, the carrier wave shifts in a rather abrupt manner and represents a specific digital input. Frequency modulation is thus a more robust phenomenon that replaced simple signal amplitude and was chosen to be the modulation standard for high frequency and high-fidelity radio transmission. The term FM radio thus came up.

FM Radio receivers comprise a special FM signal detector, which it captures; the tuner thus becomes able to receive clearly the strongest signal out of the many being broadcasted on the same frequency. However, problems stay in terms of frequency drift i.e. overtaking of one signal by another that is adjacent, though it is a problem exhibited chiefly by the very old or inexpensive FM radio receivers.