An efficient baseband modem technique for data transmission over analog FM links

In mobile radio where data are transmitted over existing analog FM systems, the receive bandpass bandwidth, which is adapted to the analog speech transmission, is larger than would be required by data transmission. This results in poor error performance. A novel baseband modem technique which drastically improves the error performance is proposed and analyzed. A smearing filter is used to convert the compound baseband noise at the limiter discriminator output to approximately Gaussian noise. This optimizes the performance at large carrier-to-noise ratios (CNRs). A baseband click detection and elimination scheme, which improves the performance at small CNR is proposed. Simulation results show that this system requires 3.8 dB less CNR than the conventional digital FM system to achieve a bit error probability of 10^-4. It is concluded that the technique is attractive for data transmission over analog FM links