Technical Paper

FM Receiver - Extreme Dynamic Range Test Case

AM/FM radios are subject to many signal impairments caused by reflections, multi-path propagation, adjacent and co-channel interferers, shadowing, and electrical noise from many sources. In urban environments, the FM band is often congested with strong local stations and other moderate or weak signals. .

In order to evaluate the subjective reception quality between radios, OEM car manufacturers have developed test plans based on specific in-field routes at different locations. These locations are known to fully stress the radio performance. The optimization of performance involves a complex cocktail of mitigation strategies. For example, in the case of sudden deep fading, the radio will switch from stereo to mono or cut off the high frequency audio content to reduce the subjective noise level.