The author is director of engineering for Broadcast Engineering Consultants LLC.
I am a bit chagrined that AM has been declared dead and no one has even tried to optimize the listener experience!
The receivers are dreadful and are poor examples of wasted design effort. The new DSP chip receivers are wasting the computing power by modeling a diode detector with NO enhancements of the basic technology. Autocorrelation of the two sidebands, impulse noise blanking and variable bandwidth are easily accomplished in the programming of the DSP, and after the initial programming effort they cost NOTHING to incorporate into the final product.
Yet no one seems to care that they could have a clearly superior receiver to market for a token expense!
I can optimize the heck out of the bandwidth, the distortion and the group delay in addition to linearizing the transmitter system to sound transparent, yet with only crappy receiver designs to choose from my efforts have only limited results.
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