New answers tagged amplifier
2
All modes @ Mike Waters
So, clearly, then your only choice is to modulate at low powers and then amplify the modulated signal:
Devices that affect a high-power signal do exist (for example, high-powered frequency mixers), but they are inherently somewhat mode-specific. (or very high in loss, which means you'd never want to use them at high powers.)
You ...
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Pretty much every design I've looked at in detail (I'm not a radio engineer or electronic designer, but I've looked at circuits with an eye to building them) does the modulation before any power amplification.
The way I understand it, the modulator can be less costly when its modulating a milliwatt signal than if you try to modulate, say, a hundred watts -- ...
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If I were to design an amplifier, I would always design an amplifier with low noise anyway.
Nope! For a power amplifier, you'd do a different tradeoff; the noise figure of that amplifier nearly doesn't matter at all, whereas the capability to produce a high output power does very much.
Same goes for other aspects of amplifiers, things like linearity/...
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