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How Radio Works

 

Pulse Modulation - In PM, you simply turn the sine wave on and off. This is an easy way to send Morse code. PM is not that common, but one good example of it is the radio system that sends signals to radio-controlled clocks in the United States. One PM transmitter is able to cover the entire United States!

Amplitude Modulation - Both AM radio stations and the picture part of a TV signal use amplitude modulation to encode information. In amplitude modulation, the amplitude of the sine wave (its peak-to-peak voltage) changes. So, for example, the sine wave produced by a person's voice is overlaid onto the transmitter's sine wave to vary its amplitude.

 

Frequency Modulation - FM radio stations and hundreds of other wireless technologies (including the sound portion of a TV signal, cordless phones, cell phones, etc.) use frequency modulation. The advantage to FM is that it is largely immune to static. In FM, the transmitter's sine wave frequency changes very slightly based on the information signal.

 

Once you modulate a sine wave with information, you can transmit the information!

 

Receiving an AM Signal

Here's a real world example. When you tune your car's AM radio to a station -- for example, 680 on the AM dial -- the transmitter's sine wave is transmitting at 680,000 hertz (the sine wave repeats 680,000 times per second). The DJ's voice is modulated onto that carrier wave by varying the amplitude of the transmitter's sine wave. An amplifier amplifies the signal to something like 50,000 watts for a large AM station. Then the antenna sends the radio waves out into space.

So how does your car's AM radio -- a receiver -- receive the 680,000-hertz signal that the transmitter sent and extract the information (the DJ's voice) from it? Here are the steps:

  • Unless you are sitting right beside the transmitter, your radio receiver needs anantenna to help it pick the transmitter's radio waves out of the air. An AM antenna is simply a wire or a metal stick that increases the amount of metal the transmitter's waves can interact with.
  • Your radio receiver needs a tuner. The antenna will receive thousands of sine waves. The job of a tuner is to separate one sine wave from the thousands of radio signals that the antenna receives. In this case, the tuner is tuned to receive the 680,000-hertz signal. Tuners work using a principle called resonance. That is, tunersresonate at, and amplify, one particular frequency and ignore all the other frequencies in the air. It is easy to create a resonator with a capacitor and an inductor(check out How Oscillators Work to see how inductors and capacitors work together to create a tuner).
  • The tuner causes the radio to receive just one sine wave frequency (in this case, 680,000 hertz). Now the radio has to extract the DJ's voice out of that sine wave. This is done with a part of the radio called a detector or demodulator. In the case of an AM radio, the detector is made with an electronic component called adiode. A diode allows current to flow through in one direction but not the other, so it clips off one side of the wave, like this:
  • The radio next amplifies the clipped signal and sends it to the speakers (or a headphone). The amplifier is made of one or more transistors (more transistors means more amplification and therefore more power to the speakers).

What you hear coming out the speakers is the DJ's voice!

In an FM radio, the detector is different, but everything else is the same. In FM, the detector turns the changes in frequency into sound, but the antenna, tuner and amplifier are largely the same.

 

The Simplest AM Receiver

In the case of a strong AM signal, it turns out that you can create a simple radio receiver with just two parts and some wire! The process is extremely simple -- here's what you need:

  • A diode - You can get a diode for about $1 at Radio Shack. Part number 276-1123 will do.
  • Two pieces of wire - You'll need about 20 to 30 feet (15 to 20 meters) of wire. Radio Shack part number 278-1224 is great, but any wire will do.
  • A small metal stake that you can drive into the ground (or, if the transmitter has a guard rail or metal fence nearby, you can use that)
  • A crystal earphone - Unfortunately, Radio Shack does not sell one. However, Radio Shack does sell a Crystal Radio Kit (part number 28-178) that contains the earphone, diode, wire and a tuner (which means that you don't need to stand right next to the transmitter for this to work), all for $10.

You now need to find and be near an AM radio station's transmitting tower (within a mile/1.6 km or so) for this to work. Here's what you do:

  • Drive the stake into the ground, or find a convenient metal fence post. Strip the insulation off the end of a 10-foot (3-meter) piece of wire and wrap it around the stake/post five or 10 times to get a good solid connection. This is the ground wire.
  • Attach the diode to the other end of the ground wire.
  • Take another piece of wire, 10 to 20 feet long (3 to 6 meters), and connect one end of it to the other end of the diode. This wire is your antenna. Lay it out on the ground, or hang it in a tree, but make sure the bare end does not touch the ground.
  • Connect the two leads from the earplug to either end of the diode, like this:

Now if you put the earplug in your ear, you will hear the radio station -- that is the simplest possible radio receiver! This super-simple project will not work if you are very far from the station, but it does demonstrate how simple a radio receiver can be.

Here's how it works. Your wire antenna is receiving all sorts of radio signals, but because you are so close to a particular transmitter it doesn't really matter. The nearby signal overwhelms everything else by a factor of millions. Because you are so close to the transmitter, the antenna is also receiving lots of energy -- enough to drive an earphone! Therefore, you don't need a tuner or batteries or anything else. The diode acts as a detector for the AM signal as described in the previous section. So you can hear the station despite the lack of a tuner and an amplifier!

The Crystal Radio Kit that Radio Shack sells (28-178) contains two extra parts: an inductor and a capacitor. These two parts create a tuner that gives the radio extra range. See How Oscillators Work for details.

Antenna Basics

You have probably noticed that almost every radio you see (like your cell phone, the radio in your car, etc.) has an antenna. Antennas come in all shapes and sizes, depending on the frequency the antenna is trying to receive. The antenna can be anything from a long, stiff wire (as in the AM/FM radio antennas on most cars) to something as bizarre as a satellite dish. Radio transmitters also use extremely tall antenna towers to transmit their signals.

The idea behind an antenna in a radio transmitter is to launch the radio waves into space. In a receiver, the idea is to pick up as much of the transmitter's power as possible and supply it to the tuner. For satellites that are millions of miles away, NASA uses huge dish antennas up to 200 feet (60 meters ) in diameter!

The size of an optimum radio antenna is related to the frequency of the signal that the antenna is trying to transmit or receive. The reason for this relationship has to do with the speed of light, and the distance electrons can travel as a result. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second). On the next page, we'll use this number to calculate a real-life antenna size.

 

Antenna: Real-life Examples

Let's say that you are trying to build a radio tower for radio station 680 AM. It is transmitting a sine wave with a frequency of 680,000 hertz. In one cycle of the sine wave, the transmitter is going to move electrons in the antenna in one direction, switch and pull them back, switch and push them out and switch and move them back again. In other words, the electrons will change direction four times during one cycle of the sine wave. If the transmitter is running at 680,000 hertz, that means that every cycle completes in (1/680,000) 0.00000147 seconds. One quarter of that is 0.0000003675 seconds. At the speed of light, electrons can travel 0.0684 miles (0.11 km) in 0.0000003675 seconds. That means the optimal antenna size for the transmitter at 680,000 hertz is about 361 feet (110 meters). So AM radio stations need very tall towers. For a cell phone working at 900,000,000 (900 MHz), on the other hand, the optimum antenna size is about 8.3 cm or 3 inches. This is why cell phones can have such short antennas.

 
 
 

You might have noticed that the AM radio antenna in your car is not 300 feet long -- it is only a couple of feet long. If you made the antenna longer it would receive better, but AM stations are so strong in cities that it doesn't really matter if your antenna is the optimal length.

You might wonder why, when a radio transmitter transmits something, radio waves want to propagate through space away from the antenna at the speed of light. Why can radio waves travel millions of miles? Why doesn't the antenna just have a magnetic field around it, close to the antenna, as you see with a wire attached to a battery? One simple way to think about it is this: When current enters the antenna, it does create a magnetic field around the antenna. We have also seen that the magnetic field will create an electric field (voltage and current) in another wire placed close to the transmitter. It turns out that, in space, the magnetic field created by the antenna induces an electric field in space. This electric field in turn induces another magnetic field in space, which induces another electric field, which induces another magnetic field, and so on. These electric and magnetic fields (electromagnetic fields) induce each other in space at the speed of light, traveling outward away from the antenna.

 
Category: Education | Views: 962 | Added by: farrel | Tags: How Radio Works by Marshall Brain B | Rating: 0.0/0
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