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PHYSICS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

Signals and Transmissions

Introduction

 Communication refers to the transmission of information or messages from one point to another
point.
 In modern communication systems, information is first converted to electrical signals and then sent
electronically.
 This has an advantage of speed and reliability and the possibility of communicating over a long
distance.
 For communication to be successful, it is essential that the sender and the receiver understand a
common language.
 This can be successfully done by using signals.
 In any communication system, the information is first converted to an electrical signal with the help
of a device called a transducer.
 Most speech or information signals cannot be directly transmitted to a long distance.
 So an intermediate step of modulation is necessary in which the information signal is loaded or
superimposed on a high-frequency wave.

Signals

 Any message or information converted to the electrical form and suitable for transmission is called
a signal.
 With the help of an electrical transducer, we convert some physical variable (e.g. pressure,
displacement, force, temperature) into its corresponding variable and its output as an electrical
signal.
 Signals are of two types—analogue or digital.

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PHYSICS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

Analogue Signals

Analogue signal

 Analogue signals are continuous variations of voltage or current.


 They are essentially single-valued functions of time.
 Example: The sine wave is a fundamental analogue signal.
 Such sinusoidal continuously varying signals may have infinite instantaneous values within the
range of a maximum value (Vmax) and a minimum value (Vmin).
 All other analogue signals can be fully understood in terms of their sine wave components.
 In an analogue signal, the current or voltage values vary continuously with time.
 The decimal number system is used in the analogue system.
 Sound and picture signals in TV are analogue in nature.

Digital Signals

Digital signal
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PHYSICS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

 Digital signals can take only discrete stepwise values.


 In a digital communication system, signals are designed for dual operations.
 The binary system extensively used in digital electronics uses just two levels of a signal. ‘0’
corresponds to a low level and ‘1’ corresponds to a high level of voltage/current.
 Digital signals are discontinuous signals.
 Several coding schemes are used in digital communication.
 They use suitable combinations of number systems such as the binary coded decimal (BCD).
American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a universally popular digital code
to represent numbers, letters and certain characters.
 A binary number system with base 2 is used in digital signalling.
 Digital signals are in the form of rectangular waves as shown in the figure.

Bandwidth of Signals

 Bandwidth refers to the frequency range over which an equipment operates or the portion of the
spectrum occupied by the signal.
 In a communication system, each type of signal such as voice, music, picture or computer data has
different ranges of frequencies.
 The type of communication system needed for a given signal depends on the band of frequencies
which is considered essential for the communication process.
 For speech signals, a frequency range of 300 Hz to 3100 Hz is required.
 Therefore, a speech signal requires a bandwidth of 2800 Hz (3100 Hz–300 Hz) for commercial
telephonic communication.
 To transmit music, an approximate bandwidth of 20 kHz is required because of the high
frequencies produced by musical instruments.
 The audible range of frequencies extends from 20 Hz to 20 kHz.
 Video signals for transmission of pictures require about 4.2 MHz of bandwidth.
 A TV signal contains both voice and picture and is usually allocated 6 MHz of bandwidth for
transmission.

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