Telecommunication systems have many key concepts with it. First, the basic system consists of three primary units that are always present in some form. There should be a transmitter, an electronic device which, with the aid of an antenna, produces radio waves. It also takes information and converts it to a signal, or any stream of quantities in time or spatial sequence.
A telecommunication system should also have a transmission medium, also called the “physical channel” that carries the signal. It could be any material (solid, liquid, gas, or plasma) as long as it can propagate energy waves. An example is the “free space channel,” an optical communication technology that uses light propagating in free space to transmit data for telecommunications or computer networking. A receiver, an electronic device that receives radio waves and converts the information carried by them to a usable form, of course, is also needed.
Second, communication signals can be either by analog signals or digital signals. Analog signal is any continuous signal for which the time varying feature (variable) of the signal is a representation of some other time varying quantity like analogous to another time varying signal. Digital signal, on the other hand, is a physical signal that is a representation of a sequence of discrete values, a quantified discrete-time signal, like an arbitrary bit stream, or of a digitized (sampled and analog-to-digital converted) analog signal.
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