The Secret Behind Mobile Phones
Almost everyone has a mobile phone nowadays. People can be found fidgeting and playingon the things everywhere. Some people’s lives are tangled up with these gadgets, they are lost without them and may even panicif they cannot find themfor a few seconds. Teenagers use mobile phones to keep contact with friends on facebook, working people use them to check email and quite a few other things. But wait , how exactly do these contraptions that rule our lives work?
A cellular phone is in fact just a glorified radio. Where a radio or walkie-talkie can only use forty channels, a mobile phone has the ability to use 1664 channels. The mobile phones grid is divided into cells, each of which covers a particular area of the city. These cells do overlap somewhat to allow calls to be transferred between cells without worrying about the callers noticing. This transfer process is called a handoff or handover. This means that a person holding a conversation on a mobile phone can travel a good distance without being cut off, provided needless to say they do not move through areas that have no cell coverage.
Because there are a limited number of frequencies available on radio waves, cell bases need to use low power transmitters so that bases not far from one another can use the same frequency without disturbing each other’s signal.
Mobile phones comes with an individual code which identifies it on the network and allows the network to keep track of which cell the mobile phone is using and whenever it is about to require a handoff. Whenever you make or receive a call, the network locates your phone and provides it a frequency pair to use while it is in that cell.
Sometimes you are moving around whilst making a call and may even move into the domain of some other cell. When this happens the adjoining cells coordinate a handoff. Which means that the first cell realises your signal is diminishing while the new cell realises that the signal is increasing and knows that it will need to take over the call. Your phone receives a brand new pair of frequencies and the call is switched over to the new cell without a hitch.
The specific call is made over radio waves. Each sound you and your call partner make is transmitted to the other phone by means of radio waves. The receiving phone picks up and transposes the radio waves into voice patterns once again and you can hear what is being said to you. This all happens at the speed of sound! Give or take a few micro milliseconds however for translation to take place.
Mobile phones are rather intricate bits of technology. They don’t just send signals to a radio tower and after that to a chosen mobile phone. There’s a lot more involved than is covered in this article, it is just way to complex in nature to go into in depth. Next time you use your mobile phone take the time to appreciate the technology at work in a simple little call.
- Tags: cellphones, communication, technology