Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why You Don’t See THESE On Phones Anymore”.
Remember when cellphones were the hot new thing and a big clunky phone with an antenna that you had to pull out was the epitome of cool you. Don’T really old, anywho cell phones quickly started to shrink in the late 1990s, but many models still had visible antennas of some sort until the smartphone era came along, getting us all used to sleek rectangular devices without anything poking out at an odd angle. That is until you have to bust out a dongle, but how exactly does a phone pick up a signal without a visible antenna? I mean, as a 90’s kid my knee-jerk response for a long time to a reception issue, whether it was on the phone, the TV or the radio was to pull the antenna out and start. You know waggling it around until the problem went away. So why don’t we even have the option to do that anymore? Well, one explanation you’ll often hear has to do with the frequencies used by modern cell phones.
You see an antenna typically needs to be about 1/2 to 1/4 of the wavelength of the signal that it’s receiving in order to function properly, and you can see this for yourself if you’ve ever noticed a CB radio antenna attached to a car, because CB radios operate On a frequency where the wavelength is around 11 meters, the antennas can be comically long. Fortunately, the wavelengths of typical cellular frequencies are much shorter, so, depending on what kind of network you’re connected to your phone needs an antenna, that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of around 5. To 7 inches but then hold on a minute. Those older phones also used frequencies in the 800 to 900 megahertz range. So it turns out that the main issue was figuring out how to stick a 5 inch antenna inside a device.
That’S supposed to be handheld, and this was harder than you might think, even though older phones were relatively speaking so large, just as the interiors of today’s smartphones are quite crowded with all the features that are packed inside. Older phones also had tons of components taking up space within the chassis as time went on, though, and consumer demand for ever smaller phones increased. It became clear that this was a problem worth solving as otherwise reasonably sized phones with large antennae sticking out of them were less portable, more fragile and, for being honest, just less sexy.
Sorry, I am that shallow. So the solution came in 1998, courtesy of a little company. You might have heard of called Nokia instead of using a long metal rod. They stamped the antenna onto a component inside the phone in a thin flat layer, and not only that, but this new antenna was also printed with a number of folds and turns kind of like the traces on a printed circuit board.
Instead of in a straight line that meant it took up very little space, but was still long enough to receive a signal, so this paradigm has lasted into the modern age where thin metal antennas, folded up inside foam bodies are the norm, and many phones even use Part of the exterior medal of the phone body itself as part of the antenna, in fact having one end of the antenna, be a large flat sheet like the metal backing of a smartphone, can give a significant boost in bandwidth. These physical innovations, combined with processing advances that make it easier for phones to work with a weaker signal, meaning that there just isn’t much reason to stick antennas way on the outside of the main body anymore and in the somewhat near future. Faster 5g connections that use even higher frequency signals could mean that antennas inside our phones would need to take up even less room, though, if you’re one of those folks that really misses the old-school antennas, I do hear that boom boxes have been making a big comeback. So you should probably look into that. Speaking of things to look into our sponsor. For today, mass drop mass drops sennheiser HD 6x acts. Headphones are one of their all-time bestsellers, with over 50,000 units sold. They have an unchanged driver and sound signature compared to the HD 650, so that means nice balanced, mid-range, sound and natural-sounding base. They’Ve got a detachable six-foot cable instead of a 10 foot, cable based on community feedback and they’ve got both a 1/8 inch plug.
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