MATLAB: Spectrum of fm modulaton

fm modulationspectrum

Is there a way to plot the spectrum of an fm modulated signal. I know that Fourier transform is not directly applicable for fm signals as they are not linear. So is there a direct method to do that [even for a tone modulation at least]?

Best Answer

Hello AbdAlla, The generation of a real fm signal is not a linear process, but there is no problem with finding the resulting spectrum by fft since the fft can find the frequency components of any signal. The fft works out best with modulation by a tone or the sum of a small number of tones, AND when the carrier and all the tones have an exact number of cycles in the time array.
(revised) Here is a small example:
F = 1e6;                 % sampling frequency
f0 = 20000;              % carrier
f1 = 200;                % modulating tone
beta = 1;                % modulation index  
% signal, spectrum
N = 1e6;
t = (0:N-1)*(1/F);       % delt = 1us
y = cos(2*pi*f0*t+beta*cos(2*pi*f1*t));
z = fftshift(fft(y))/N;
f = (-N/2:N/2-1)*(F/N);
% predicted sidebands for the positive frequencies only
n = 4;
sidamp = (1/2)*besselj(0:n,beta);
sidamp = [fliplr(sidamp(2:end)), sidamp];
sidf = (f0-n*f1):f1:(f0+n*f1);
figure(1)
plot (f,abs(z))
xlim([-2*f0 2*f0])
figure(2)
plot(f,abs(z),sidf,sidamp,'o')
xlim([f0-f1*10 f0+f1*10])            % sidebands at the pos frequencies
Fig 1 shows positive and negative frequencies. Most of the time people double the abs(amplitudes) and show positive frequencies only, in which case the sideband calculation does not have the factor of 1/2.
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