Swisscom : What hi-fi loudspeakers and mobile communication antennas have in common

Cellular

Hi-fi loudspeakers and modern mobile communication antennas both use waves, albeit different ones. They also have other things in common.

A good hi-fi loudspeaker consists of woofers, mid-range speakers and tweeters. These allow a loudspeaker to reproduce different pitches precisely. In turn, the different pitches have different characteristics with respect to travel. Low tones, such as the bass, travel further than high tones. Or to be more precise: they penetrate obstacles and objects much more easily. This is also the reason why, at a loud concert, you can hear the booming of the bass for miles around, while higher notes are silenced much sooner.

The situation is similar with mobile communications. An antenna generates electromagnetic waves that travel through space and transmit information between the antenna and the device. As communication takes place in both directions, mobile phones also have built-in antennas.

Just like a good hi-fi loudspeaker with woofers, mid-range speakers and tweeters, a mobile communication site and a device also need different types of antennas. Modern antennas and devices now integrate different pitches, i.e. frequency ranges, in one casing - just like a loudspeaker.

As is the case with woofers, the lower frequencies also travel further in mobile communications. This results in more coverage in terms of area. Higher tones travel less far, and this also applies to the higher frequencies in mobile communications. However, because more bandwidth is reserved in the higher frequencies, more data can be transmitted there. The higher tones therefore provide the capacity in mobile communications. You've already guessed it: just as good hi-fi-quality music requires different loudspeakers in different frequency ranges, a good mobile communication network is characterised by different antennas that cover all pitches, i.e. different frequency ranges. This ensures that both coverage and capacity are right.

At this point, an incorrect conclusion is often drawn in connection with antennas. After all, the mobile communication generation - the "G" on the mobile phone - has no direct connection with the antenna. The mobile communication generation is like the hi-fi system with everything that goes with it: amplifier, receiver, music processing and transmission through to the loudspeaker.

There are various approaches to reproducing music as faithfully as possible in a hi-fi system: higher-quality cables, optical instead of analogue connections, higher-resolution signal processing with finer gradations and much more. With digital music data, the so-called codec also plays a role, i.e. the way in which the actual music was converted into digital data.

Mobile communication generations reflect the same development: they have got better and better over the years. Improvements are being made to all the cogs in the system: with each generation, they transmit their mobile communication music in much finer gradations, in better quality and with much less energy.

Advanced adaptive antennas now feature a new loudspeaker design. Instead of large loudspeakers, many small loudspeakers are now installed in one casing, all of which can be controlled individually and which now direct sound in the direction of the listener. They only send the music to where someone wants to hear it. If mobile communication signals were audible, they would have been audible to everyone across the entire angle of radiation to date, even if only one person was on the phone. Now things are much more targeted, reducing emissions for all those who do not want to hear the music. A good thing, right?

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