A Modified Adaptive FIR Equalizer for Multipath Echo Cancellation in FM Transmission

Multipath propagation is a severe problem in conventional FM broadcasting since this phenomenon causes nonlinear distortions after demodulation. Several proposals for the correction of multipath corrupted FM signals were given in some recent papers, but up to now there exist no satisfactory solutions with sufficiently low hardware complexity for commercial application. The main idea of the present paper is to take advantage of some a priori knowledge of the multipath transfer function with the goal to develop a nonrecursive equalizer structure with minimum hardware expense. For adaptive adjustment of the equalizer, we use a recently introduced constant modulus algorithm (CMA) in a modified form. Instead of direct coefficient adjustment, we regard the parameters of the transmission channel as unknowns which are updated adaptively. The equalizer coefficients are uniquely defined by the channel parameters and can be determined in one step. The advantage of this method is a large improvement of the convergence behavior in comparison to existing solutions. The methods presented here are tested by means of an FM hardware system including FM transmitter, multipath simulation, FM demodulator, and an FIR multipath equalizer, which allows real-time investigations of the equalizer performance under well-defined multipath conditions.