Electronic – Envelope detector

amdetectorsignal processing

I would like to have the envelope from a signal using a simple circuit composed of a diode and a low pass filter.

I know :

*Tam > t >> Tcarrier

*The diode must be a germanium diode because of the Vthreshold

I use:

*A germanium diode

*R = 1k

*C = 4.7nF

The wave is generate from a GBF :

*fcarrier = 1MHz
*fam = 20 kHz

My circuit:

enter image description here

I took a capture from the oscloscope measuring the signal accross the resistance.
My signal is shown bellow :

enter image description here

My questions are:

  • How can I have a clean modulating signal?
  • Some books talk about a High pass filter, why it could be necessary? (I tried and it's not better)
  • The circuit is currently designed for a specific carrier but if my carrier has a defined range (in my case I will have a range between 1MHz to 7MHz), how could I adapt the circuit (or is there another circuit)?
  • Is the type of the capacitor change something?

Thank you,

Farad

Best Answer

The frequency ratio between your carrier and your modulation is only 50:1, which is less than 6 octaves (less than 2 decades). You'll need a much better filter than a single-pole RC network to effectively separate the two.

The output of the diode alone is a half-wave rectified version of the original signal. While the average value of the original signal was 0, the average value of the rectified signal is proportional to the envelope of the signal. It is the job of the output filter to separate this average value from all of the other higher-frequency components.

To eliminate obvious distortion on the oscilloscope, you'll need to attenuate the carrier voltage by a factor of 100 or more relative to the baseband signal, which is a power ratio of 40 dB. To accomplish this within a 50:1 frequency ratio, you'd need a filter with a minimum slope of

$$\frac{40 dB}{\log_{10}(50)} = 24 dB/decade$$

This assumes that the cutoff frequency of the filter is exactly equal to the highest frequency of the baseband signal, which means that that frequency will also be attenuated by 3 dB. The point is, you'll need at least a two-pole filter, and you'll need something more sophisticated than a resistor and capacitor connected directly to the diode, which creates asymmetries in the time-domain response because of its varying source impedance.

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