Understanding Radio Technology

Free music, news, and chat wherever you go! Until the Internet came along,
nothing could rival the reach of radio—not even television. A radio is a box filled with
electronic components that catches radio waves sailing through the air, a bit like a
baseball catcher's mitt, and converts them back into sounds your ears can hear.
Radio was first developed in the late-19th century and reached the height of its
popularity several decades later. Although radio broadcasting is not quite as popular
as it once was, the basic idea of wireless communication remains hugely important:
in the last few years, radio has become the heart of new technologies such
as wireless Internet, cellphones (mobile phones), and RFID (radio frequency
identification) chips. Meanwhile, radio itself has recently gained a new lease of life
with the arrival of better-quality digital radio sets.

What is radio?
You might think "radio" is a gadget you listen to, but it also means something else.
Radio means sending energy with waves. In other words, it's a method of
transmitting electrical energy from one place to another without using any kind of
direct, wired connection. That's why it's often called wireless. The equipment that
sends out a radio wave is known as a transmitter; the radio wave sent by a
transmitter whizzes through the air—maybe from one side of the world to the
other—and completes its journey when it reaches a second piece of equipment
called a receiver.

When you extend the antenna (aerial) on a radio receiver, it snatches some of the
electromagnetic energy passing by. Tune the radio into a station and
an electronic circuit inside the radio selects only the program you want from all
those that are broadcasting.

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Artwork: How radio waves travel from a transmitter to a receiver. 1) Electrons rush up and down the transmitter,
shooting out radio waves. 2) The radio waves travel through the air at the speed of light. 3) When the radio
waves hit a receiver, they make electrons vibrate inside it, recreating the original signal. This process can
happen between one powerful transmitter and many receivers—which is why thousands or millions of people
can pick up the same radio signal at the same time.

How does this happen? The electromagnetic energy, which is a mixture

of electricity and magnetism, travels past you in waves like those on the surface of
the ocean. These are called radio waves. Like ocean waves, radio waves have a
certain speed, length, and frequency. The speed is simply how fast the wave travels
between two places. The wavelength is the distance between one crest (wave peak)
and the next, while the frequency is the number of waves that arrive each second.
Frequency is measured with a unit called hertz, so if seven waves arrive in a second,
we call that seven hertz (7 Hz). If you've ever watched ocean waves rolling in to the
beach, you'll know they travel with a speed of maybe one meter (three feet) per
second or so. The wavelength of ocean waves tends to be tens of meters or feet, and
the frequency is about one wave every few seconds.

When your radio sits on a bookshelf trying to catch waves coming into your home,
it's a bit like you standing by the beach watching the breakers rolling in. Radio waves
are much faster, longer, and more frequent than ocean waves, however. Their
wavelength is typically hundreds of meters—so that's the distance between one
wave crest and the next. But their frequency can be in the millions of hertz—so
millions of these waves arrive each second. If the waves are hundreds of meters
long, how can millions of them arrive so often? It's simple. Radio waves
travel unbelievably fast—at the speed of light (300,000 km or 186,000 miles per
second).

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 Photo: A radio studio is essentially a soundproof box that converts sounds into high-quality signals
that can be broadcast using a transmitter. Credit: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive,
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Analog radio
Ocean waves carry energy by making the water move up and down. In much the
same way, radio waves carry energy as an invisible, up-and-down movement of
electricity and magnetism. This carries program signals from huge transmitter
antennas, which are connected to the radio station, to the smaller antenna on your
radio set. A program is transmitted by adding it to a radio wave called a carrier. This
process is called modulation. Sometimes a radio program is added to the carrier in
such a way that the program signal causes fluctuations in the carrier's frequency.
This is called frequency modulation (FM). Another way of sending a radio signal is to
make the peaks of the carrier wave bigger or smaller. Since the size of a wave is
called its amplitude, this process is known as amplitude modulation (AM).
Frequency modulation is how FM radio is broadcast; amplitude modulation is the
technique used by AM radio stations.

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What's the difference between AM and FM?

An example makes this clearer. Suppose I'm on a rowboat in the ocean pretending to
be a radio transmitter and you're on the shore pretending to be a radio receiver.
Let's say I want to send a distress signal to you. I could rock the boat up and down
quickly in the water to send big waves to you. If there are already waves traveling
past my boat, from the distant ocean to the shore, my movements are going to make
those existing waves much bigger. In other words, I will be using the waves passing
by as a carrier to send my signal and, because I'll be changing the height of the
waves, I'll be transmitting my signal by amplitude modulation. Alternatively, instead
of moving my boat up and down, I could put my hand in the water and move it
quickly back and forth. Now I'll make the waves travel more often—increasing their
frequency. So, in this case, my signal will travel to you by frequency modulation.

Sending information by changing the shapes of waves is an example of

an analog process. This means the information you are trying to send is represented
by a direct physical change (the water moving up and down or back and forth more
quickly).

The trouble with AM and FM is that the program signal becomes part of the wave
that carries it. So, if something happens to the wave en-route, part of the signal is
likely to get lost. And if it gets lost, there's no way to get it back again. Imagine I'm
sending my distress signal from the boat to the shore and a speedboat races in
between. The waves it creates will quickly overwhelm the ones I've made and
obliterate the message I'm trying to send. That's why analog radios can sound
crackly, especially if you're listening in a car. Digital radio can help to solve that
problem by sending radio broadcasts in a coded, numeric format so that interference
doesn't disrupt the signal in the same way. We'll talk about that in a moment, but
first let's see take a peek inside an analog radio.

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Digital radio

You're driving along the freeway and your favorite song comes on the radio. You go
under a bridge and—buzz, hiss, crackle, pop—the song disappears in a burst of static.
Just as people have got used to such niggles, inventors have come up with a new
type of radio that promises almost perfect sound. Digital radio, as it's called, sends
speech and songs through the air as strings of numbers. No matter what comes
between your radio and the transmitter, the signal almost always gets through.
That's why digital radio sounds better. But digital technology also brings many more
stations and displays information about the program you're listening to (such as the
names of music tracks or programs).

How is digital radio different from analog?

Let's go back to the earlier example of sending information from a boat to the
shore—but this time using a digital method. In case of emergency, I could store
hundreds of plastic ducks on my boat, each one carrying a number. If I get into
trouble, as before, and want to send a distress signal, I could send you an emergency
coded message "12345" by releasing just the ducks with those numbers. Let's
suppose I do have a problem. I release ducks with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5—but
instead of sending just five numbered ducks, I send maybe 10 or 20 of each duck to
increase the chances of the message arriving. Now, even if the sea is choppy or a
speedboat cuts through, there's still a high chance enough of the ducks will get
through. Eventually, waves will carry ducks with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 ashore.
You collect the ducks together and work out what I'm trying to say.

That's more or less how digital radio works!

 The transmitter sends program signals broken into fragments and coded in
numbers (digits).
 The transmitter sends each fragment many times to increase the chances of it
getting through.
 Even when things interrupt or delay some of the fragments, the receiver can
still piece together fragments arriving from other places and put them
together to make an uninterrupted program signal.

To help avoid interference, a digital radio signal travels on a huge, broad band of
radio frequencies about 1500 times wider than those used in analog radio. To return

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to our rowboat example, if I could send a wave 1500 times wider, it would bypass
any speedboats that got in the way and get to the shore more easily. This wide band
allows a single digital signal to carry six stereo music programs or 20 speech
programs in one go. Blending signals together in this way is called multiplexing. Part
of the signal might be music, while another part could be a stream of text
information that tells you what the music is, the name of the DJ, which radio station
you're listening to, and so on.

Why don't radio waves all get mixed up?

From TV broadcasts to GPS satellite navigation, radio waves zap all kinds of handy
information through the air, so you might be wondering why these very different
signals don't get thoroughly mixed up? Now we have digital broadcasting, it's a lot
easier to keep radio signals separate from one another using complex, mathematical
codes; that's how people can use hundreds of cellphones simultaneously in a single
city street without hearing one another's calls. But going back a few decades to the
time when there was only analog radio, the only sensible way of stopping different
types of signal from interfering with one another was to split the entire spectrum of
radio frequencies into different bands with little or no overlap. Here are a few

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examples of the main radio broadcasting bands (don't take these as exact;
definitions do vary somewhat around the world, some of the bands do overlap, and I
have rounded some of the figures as well):

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Propagation of Electromagnetic Waves:

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