Frequency
• If you can imagine standing on the bank of a large lake, in your hand you have a good-sized stone. You toss the stone high in the air, as falls and hit’s the surface of the water with a “plop”, you can see a number of circular ripples radiate outwards from the exact spot where the stone entered the water. The ripples from the stone act in the same fashion that radio wave’s act, in a constant steady wave.
Now you pick up another stone, roughly the same size as the last one. This time when you toss the stone in the air you throw it higher in the air, now when the stone plunges into the water because of the added height that it was thrown it will create an even larger splash which in turn will create larger ripples and more of them. Frequency works in the much of the same manner; the rate at which a specific incident occurs will dictate the type of radio wave that is created. This process creates a radio waves frequency, or the amount of times a particular radio wave repeats itself.
Analog vs. Digital
• An analog signal is consistent, steady signal; on the flip side of an analog signal is a digital signal. A digital signal is strictly based on 0’s and 1’s or if it will help to understand on’s and off’s. As an analogy lets go back to our lake, by tossing our stone in the air we create ripples and in turn will cause a constant and steady wave.
As for the digital signal, if we were to use a flat stone and skipped it across the lake. The stone would still create ripples, but instead of one constant wave we would see a ripple then a break and then a ripple and then break and so on until the stone fell into the water.
In order to get a full understanding of analog and digital signals we must understand what each signal is. In analog the carrier signal is always continuous, with digital the signal occurs in distinct and specific steps that are transmitted in binary code.