Carrierless amplitude phase modulation (
CAP) is a variant of
quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). Instead of modulating the amplitude of two carrier waves, CAP generates a QAM signal by combining two
PAM signals filtered through two filters designed so that their
impulse responses form a
Hilbert pair. If the impulse responses of the two filters are chosen as sine and a cosine, the only mathematical difference between QAM and CAP waveforms is that the phase of the carrier is reset at the beginning of each symbol. If the
carrier frequency and symbol rates are similar, the main advantage of CAP over QAM is simpler implementation. The modulation of the baseband signal with the quadrature carriers is not necessary with CAP, because it is part of the transmit pulse.