Fading The term fading, or, small-scale fading, means rapid fluctuations of the amplitudes, phases, or multipath delays of a radio signal over a short period or short travel distance.This might be so severe that large scale radio propagation loss effects might be ignored Modulation Modulation is the process of encoding source data onto a carrier signal with frequency fc.The frequency of the carrier signal is chosen to be compatible with the transmission medium being used.