In telecommunication, the term detector has the following meanings:
- A device that is responsive to the presence or absence of a stimulus.
- In an AM radio receiver, a circuit or device that recovers the signal of interest from the modulated wave.
- In FM reception, a circuit called a discriminator is used to convert frequency variations to amplitude variations.
- In an optical communications receiver, a device that converts the received optical signal to another form.
- Source: from Federal Standard 1037C