Amplitude Modulation
Modulating a carrier wave by adding another, lower frequency signal results in a signal that has most of its power concentrated in the carrier, with the rest shared between two sidebands, one above the carrier in frequency and one below it. The highest frequency in the modulating signal is typically less than ten percent of that of the carrier. The process of creating these sideband frequencies by adding another signal to the carrier is known as heterodyning. In the simplest case, the carrier can be modulated by adding another single-frequency sine wave signal to it, changing the carrier's shape (or envelope) as illustrated above. The sideband frequencies account for approximately 33% of the transmitted power. If a more complex modulating signal (such as an audio signal) is used to modulate the carrier, the sidebands account for only about 20-25% of the total transmitted power.
Consider, for example, a 100 kHz carrier that is modulated by a steady audio signal (or tone) of 5 kHz. When these signals are added, two sidebands are produced. One sideband has a frequency equal to the sum of the carrier and the modulating signal (100 kHz + 5 kHz = 105 kHz), while the other sideband has a frequency equal to the difference between the carrier and the modulating signal (100 kHz - 5 kHz = 95 kHz). The two sidebands are 5 kHz equidistant from the carrier (one above it and one below it), giving a total bandwidth for the modulated signal of 10 kHz (105 kHz - 95 kHz). The resulting frequency spectrum is illustrated below
Of course, most audio signals (speech and music, for example) are far more complex than a single-frequency audio tone, and are composed of many different frequencies. When a carrier is modulated with a more complex audio signal, therefore, all of the frequencies present in the audio signal are represented in the resulting output signal. In this case, the total bandwidth is the difference between the sum and the difference values of the carrier and the highest frequency component of the modulating signal. To simplify things, the modulated signal bandwidth will be twice that of the modulating signal. For a modulating audio signal with frequency components ranging from 0 - 6 kHz, therefore, the bandwidth of the modulated signal for a 100 kHz carrier will be 106 kHz - 94 kHz = 12 kHz. This produces a more complex frequency spectrum, which might look something like that shown below.