Ask a Teacher

Search



How does mobiles work?

 By using electromagnetic radio waves to send and receive the sounds that would normally travel down wires.When you speak into a cellphone, a tiny microphone in the handset converts the up-and-down sounds of your voice into a corresponding up-and-down pattern of electrical signals. A microchip inside the phone turns these signals into strings of numbers. The numbers are packed up into a radio wave and beamed out from the phone's antenna The radio wave races through the air at the speed of light until it reaches the nearest cellphone mast.
The mast receives the signals and passes them on to its base station, which effectively coordinates what happens inside each local part of the cellphone network, which is called a cell. From the base station, the calls are routed onward to their destination. Calls made from a cellphone to another cellphone on the same network travel to their destination by being routed to the base station nearest to the destination phone, and finally to that phone itself. Calls made to a cellphone on a different network or a land line follow a more lengthy path. They may have to be routed into the main telephone network before they can reach their ultimate destination.A cellphone handset contains a radio transmitter, for sending radio signals onward from the phone, and a radio receiver, for receiving incoming signals from other phones. The radio transmitter and receiver are not very high-powered, which means cellphones cannot send signals very far.All a cellphone has to do is communicate with its local mast and base station; what the base station has to do is pick up faint signals from many cellphones and route them onward to their destination, which is why the masts are huge, high-powered antennas (often mounted on a hill or tall building).


comments powered by Disqus