Before revision: The general trend is to do as much of the signal processing in digital form as possible, and some receivers digitize the RF signal directly, without down-conversion to an IF, so here the front end is merely an RF filter
After revision: in the simple receiver path/chain.The general trend is to do as much of the signal processing in digital form as possible, and some receivers digitize the RF signal directly, without down-conversion to an IF, so here the front end is merely an RF filter