A Practical Introduction to Radio Physics - WNDW（一个实际的无线电物理WNDW概论）.pdf

2 A Practical Introduction to Radio Physics Wireless communications make use of electromagnetic waves to send sig- nals across long distances. From a users perspective, wireless connections are not particularly different from any other network connection: your web browser, email, and other applications all work as you would expect. But radio waves have some unexpected properties compared to Ethernet cable. For example, its very easy to see the path that an Ethernet cable takes: lo- cate the plug sticking out of your computer, follow the cable to the other end, and youve found it! You can also be confident that running many Ethernet cables alongside each other wont cause problems, since the cables effec- tively keep their signals contained within the wire itself. But how do you know where the waves emanating from your wireless card are going? What happens when these waves bounce off of objects in the room or other buildings in an outdoor link? How can several wireless cards be used in the same area without interfering with each other? In order to build stable high-speed wireless links, it is important to understand how radio waves behave in the real world. What is a wave? We are all familiar with vibrations or oscillations in various forms: a pendu- lum, a tree swaying in the wind, the string of a guitar - these are all examples of oscillations. 9 10 Chapter 2: A Practical Introduction to Radio Physics What they have in common is that something, some medium or object, is swinging in a periodic manner, with a certain number of cycles per unit of time. This kind of wave is sometimes called a mechanical wave , since it is defined