Comment by angel_j

7 years ago

What if you used the noise as the carrier wave for the signal? Like, if in an urban area you have a "stable" probability distribution of noise, modulate that.

You're being downvited because, whilst this is a clever sounding idea, unfortunately it doesn't work like that.

The noise is random, so you can't modulate it because you can't predict what it will be. A probability distribution isn't enough; say you want to modulate by XORing with a random, uniformly distributed stream of zeros and ones. Knowing that distribution doesn't enable the receiver to extract the data.

(Fun fact: GPS signals are under the noise floor, but detectable because they are encoded with a predictable pseudorandom carrier which can be found even in the noise.)

  • Could you... modulate the amplitude of the PD?

    • Amplitude is about power, that what you want to minimize. If you can affect the amplitude of the noise, that means your signal has high amplitude: you have a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and you already have won.