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Old 30th Sep 2017, 1:56 pm   #6
G6Tanuki
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Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Wiltshire, UK.
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Default Re: Why is aeronautical VHF AM?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter.N. View Post
Being VHF there's not to much noise about anyway, especially in an aircraft or the middle of an airfield.
The biggest sources of interference are the aircraft's own ignition system [shielded HT leads/spark-plugs are ubiquitous] - which of course travels everywhere with you - and the problem of front-end-overload if flying near to FM broadcast-band transmitters.

To comply with international aviation-standards the front-end design of modern VHF-airband radios is most intriguing: multiple varactor-tuned circuits (designed more like cavity-filters or helical resonators) with D/A converters and ROM-based lookup-tables fed from the frequency-synthesizer in order to generate the varactor voltages. It's strange at first 'aligning' a radio's front-end by entering 8-bit values into a computer, but it does give you 'correct' tracking at 254 points across the receiver's coverage!
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