If you are digging deeper into the technology of wireless connection, you certainly should learn about such essential parameters as amplitude and frequency of a signal. This article will provide you with all the necessary details on the topic.
Frequency
Every wireless device has some sort of frequency range label on them that comes in from the manufacturer. All of these device’s wireless signal varies on the wide range of spectrum of frequency at which the signal vibrates. The lower the vibration rate, the lower the signal, the higher the vibration rate, the higher the signal.
There is a unit of measurement for frequency called Hertz. The way it works is keeping the count of how many times the signal oscillates, rise and drop, per second. As an example, a FM radio signals vibrates approximately 100 million times per second. That is a lot! All of these signals are pretty high and it is quite redundant and unusual to use the whole number and unit like this. Therefore, these are usually abbreviated with terms like Megahertz (MHz) which is millions of vibrations per second and Gigahertz (GHz) which is billion of vibrations per second.
There are frequency ranges available in communication signal. This spectrum ranges from 10 MHz to 5000 MHz or 5GHz, since 1000 Megahertz is 1 GHz. There are transmitters for devices like AM, FM and Television which broadcast frequency below one thousand megahertz (MHz). AM radio uses around 10 MHz. FM radio uses around 100MHz.
For the television, frequency ranges from 470 MHz to 800 MHz.Technology like WiFi utilize two bands at higher frequencies like 2.4 and 5.4 GHz. As for the smartphones or cellular phones to be precise, use different range of frequency based on the model of the device. They can be somewhere around 850MHz to 1900MHz and more.
Satellite blows around 3.5GHz of frequency.
Amplitude
Amplitude is the strength of the signal running at a single frequency. An example of an non-modulated AM wave will look somewhat constant in the oscilloscope. Oscilloscope is where the frequency spectrum is visible by means of zigzag lines. With the modulation applied, the spectrum is not constant and therefore you are able to detect the lowest and highest AM radio frequency at some given range.
For FM radio, frequency is how fast the wave vibrates per second. Like AM radio frequency, an un-modulated frequency is generally constant. It behaves the same way when modulated but rather going too high or too low, the frequency rate dense or loses but amplitude does not change.
All these kind of modulation technologies are not often compatible with one another. For instance, Satellite can not communicate directly to your computer or smartphone and they use Wi-Fi to transmit and receive data. This is due to the radios in various kinds of devices use certain kind of modulations and frequencies.
The most comprehensible example would be an FM and AM radio. If you switch on the radio on FM you won’t be able to hear anything on AM. Likewise, if you switch on to AM you won’t be able to hear anything on FM other than static jargon. This is because the collision between the transmitter and receiver. If both of them are not compatible, they won’t make much sense to each other.