Mobile is not the latest discovery of science but the basic human need today. There was a time when people used to communicate through pigeons and letters. At that time if someone told that in future real time communication will be possible between two people sitting on different parts of the planet, others won’t have believed it. The telephone was invented then and brought a revolution in the communication.
However, even telephone had a scope of improvement. Someone thought, What if? we can talk while we walk, travel and do other important stuff. Mobiles were invented and then become an important part of our life.
After that, even mobile has gone through a lot of changes and improvements, but have you ever thought about the system behind it? What makes you connect with your loved one or colleague and of course some wrong numbers in just a matter of seconds. Most importantly, how your voice travels from one place to another, no matter how far it is.
We’ll explain you everything regarding this today.
While, it’s easy to understand the telephone communication because it has wires and we can conclude that wires take our messages from one place to another. But how the voice travels through mobile when it doesn’t have any kind of wire? Here’s the process-
How the voice travel through mobile phones
When you place it on your ears to listen and speak through the mobile, before letting you know a tiny microphone in the handset converts the sounds of your voice into the electrical signals.
A microchip inside the phone then comes into play and turns these signals into strings of numbers.
The numbers are then 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 then transfers them on to its “base station”. A base station has the work to effectively coordinate 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.
It must be noted here that calls made from a mobile phone to another mobile phone 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. However, calls made to a mobile phone 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.
Importance of Masts
Since there are so many devices in work in a certain area, there’s a chance of signals from one pair of callers to interfere with those from other pairs of callers.
A mobile phone 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 used are not of high power and can transmit signals to a set range. This is kept limited so that they can just communicate with its local mast and base station so that chances of interference are less.
The base station then pick up signals from many mobiles 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).
If we didn’t have masts, we’d need mobile phones with enormous antennas and giant power supplies and then they would not remain mobile.
A mobile phone automatically communicates with the nearest cell (the one with the strongest signal) and uses as little power as possible.
Importance of cells
A big city is divided into small areas called cells. These cells are controlled by separate masts and base stations so that the frequencies can be available to more number of people at a time.
These cells look like a patchwork of invisible hexagons and enable the system to handle many more calls at once, because each cell uses the same set of frequencies as its neighbouring cells.
The more cells, the greater the number of calls that can be made at once. This is why urban areas have many more cells than rural areas and why the cells in urban areas are much smaller.
We hope, it was a great learning experience for you.