FM provides an interesting example of the interaction of theory and invention in the development of a scientific discipline. When in 1922 engineers proposed FM as a means to reduce transmission bandwidth and thereby reduce noise, J.R. Carson proved theoretically to the contrary that FM always needs more bandwidth than AM. While his analysis was correct, his conclusion that therefore FM will always be noisier than AM was clearly wrong and it discouraged further work on FM for more than a decade. It was only around 1935 that the great inventor and intuitive thinker E. A. Armstrong disregarded Carson's conclusion and showed experimentally that FM is indeed capable of substantial noise reduction and, amazingly, this noise reduction increases with the spread of RF bandwidth. At the same time he noted that there is a limit to this tradeoff (noise threshold). The often misunderstood reason for the noise reduction with increasing bandwidth and its limits will be briefly discussed. Among other intuitive contributions are pre and de-emphasis. With the advent of digital basebands, it was conjectured that as we increase the frequency deviation and thereby obtain a less noisy output, the error rates will go down. But, the opposite was found to be true. The reason for this phenomenon and its relation to the noise threshold as first presented in a paper by this speaker will be briefly discussed. The speaker finds the world of FM very interesting.

Jacob Klapper received the BEE degree from The City College of NY, the MSEE degree from Columbia University and the EngScD degree from New York University. Following seven years at RCA's Advanced Communications Laboratory, he joined the faculty of NJIT where he is a Professor of ECE and a former chairman. He was a consultant to a number of industrial and governmental organizations. He received seven US and foreign patents, published two books, many papers and presented several tutorial courses under the auspices of the IEEE. He was a David Sarnoff Fellow, received an IEEE award for a paper, was an IEEE Distinguished International Lecturer and was awarded the IEEE Region 1 Award for his contributions to FM and phase-locked loops.