Bandwidth (signal processing) in the context of Hertz

A communication channel refers either to a physical transmission medium such as a wire, or to a logical connection over a multiplexed medium such as a radio channel in telecommunications and computer networking. A channel is used for information transfer of, for example, a digital bit stream, from one or several senders to one or several receivers. A channel has a certain capacity for transmitting information, often measured by its bandwidth in Hz or its data rate in bits per second.

Communicating an information signal across distance requires some form of pathway or medium. These pathways, called communication channels, use two types of media: Transmission line-based telecommunications cable (e.g. twisted-pair, coaxial, and fiber-optic cable) and broadcast (e.g. microwave, satellite, radio, and infrared).

In telecommunications, broadband or high speed is the wide-bandwidth data transmission that uses signals at a wide spread of frequencies or several different simultaneous frequencies. It is used in fast Internet access where the transmission medium can be coaxial cable, optical fiber, wireless Internet (radio), twisted pair cable, or satellite.

Originally used to mean "using a wide-spread frequency" and for services that were analog at the lowest level, in the context of Internet access, "broadband" is now often used to mean any high-speed Internet access that is seemingly always "on" and is faster than dial-up access over traditional analog or ISDN PSTN services.

Videotape is magnetic tape used for storing video and usually sound in addition. Information stored can be in the form of either an analog or digital signal. The tape can come in stand-alone tape reel or inside a casing such as a tape cartridge or cassette. Videotape is used in both video tape recorders (VTRs) and, more commonly, videocassette recorders (VCRs) and camcorders. Videotapes have also been used for storing scientific or medical data, such as the data produced by an electrocardiogram.

Because video signals have a very high bandwidth, and stationary heads would require extremely high tape speeds, in most cases, a helical-scan video head rotates against the moving tape to record the data in two dimensions.

Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM; mondiale being Italian and French for "worldwide") is a set of digital audio broadcasting technologies designed to work over the bands currently used for analogue radio broadcasting including AM broadcasting—particularly shortwave—and FM broadcasting. DRM is more spectrally efficient than AM and FM, allowing more stations, at higher quality, into a given amount of bandwidth, using xHE-AAC audio coding format. Various other MPEG-4 codecs and Opus are also compatible, but the standard now specifies xHE-AAC.

Digital Radio Mondiale is also the name of the international non-profit consortium that has designed the platform and is now promoting its introduction. Radio France Internationale, TéléDiffusion de France, BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, Voice of America, Telefunken (now Transradio) and Thomcast (now Ampegon) took part at the formation of the DRM consortium.

Digital television (DTV) is the transmission of television signals using digital encoding, in contrast to the earlier analog television technology which used analog signals. In the 2000s it was represented as the first significant evolution in television technology since color television in the 1950s. Modern digital television is transmitted in high-definition television (HDTV) with greater resolution than analog TV. It typically uses a widescreen aspect ratio (commonly 16:9) in contrast to the narrower format (4:3) of analog TV. It makes more economical use of scarce radio spectrum space; it can transmit up to seven channels in the same bandwidth as a single analog channel, and provides many new features that analog television cannot. A transition from analog to digital broadcasting began around 2000. Different digital television broadcasting standards have been adopted in different parts of the world; below are the more widely used standards:

• Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) uses coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation and supports hierarchical transmission. This standard has been adopted in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia, for a total of approximately 60 countries.
• Advanced Television System Committee (ATSC) standard uses eight-level vestigial sideband (8VSB) for terrestrial broadcasting. This standard has been adopted by 9 countries: the United States, Canada, Mexico, South Korea, Bahamas, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Suriname.
• Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting (ISDB) is a system designed to provide good reception to fixed receivers and also portable or mobile receivers utilizing OFDM and two-dimensional interleaving. It supports hierarchical transmission of up to three layers and uses MPEG-2 video and Advanced Audio Coding. This standard has been adopted in Japan and the Philippines. ISDB-T International is an adaptation of this standard using H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which has been adopted in most of South America as well as Botswana and Angola. 1seg (1-segment) is a special form of ISDB. Each channel is further divided into 13 segments. Twelve are allocated for HDTV and the other for narrow-band receivers such as mobile televisions and cell phones.
• Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast (DTMB) adopts time-domain synchronous (TDS) OFDM technology with a pseudo-random signal frame to serve as the guard interval (GI) of the OFDM block and the training symbol. The DTMB standard has been adopted in China, including Hong Kong and Macau.
• Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) is a digital radio transmission technology developed and adopted in South Korea as part of the national information technology project for sending multimedia such as TV, radio and datacasting to mobile devices such as mobile phones, laptops and GPS navigation systems.

A television channel, or TV channel, is a terrestrial frequency or allocated number over which a television station or television network is distributed. For example, in North America, channel 2 refers to the terrestrial or cable band of 54 to 60 MHz, with carrier frequencies of 55.25 MHz for NTSC analog video (VSB) and 59.75 MHz for analog audio (FM), or 55.31 MHz for digital ATSC (8VSB). Channels may be shared by many different television stations or cable-distributed channels depending on the location and service provider.

Depending on the multinational bandplan for a given region, analog television channels are typically 6, 7, or 8 MHz in bandwidth, and therefore television channel frequencies vary as well. Channel numbering is also different. Digital terrestrial television channels are the same as their analog predecessors for legacy reasons, however through multiplexing, each physical radio frequency (RF) channel can carry several digital subchannels. On satellites, each transponder normally carries one channel, however multiple small, independent channels can be on one transponder, with some loss of bandwidth due to the need for guard bands between unrelated transmissions. ISDB, used in Japan and Brazil, has a similar segmented mode.

Code-division multiple access (CDMA) is a channel access method used by various radio communication technologies. CDMA is an example of multiple access, where several transmitters can send information simultaneously over a single communication channel. This allows several users to share a band of frequencies (see bandwidth). To permit this without undue interference between the users, CDMA employs spread spectrum technology and a special coding scheme (where each transmitter is assigned a code).

CDMA optimizes the use of available bandwidth as it transmits over the entire frequency range and does not limit the user's frequency range.

The Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem is an essential principle for digital signal processing linking the frequency range of a signal and the sample rate required to avoid a type of distortion called aliasing. The theorem states that the sample rate must be at least twice the bandwidth of the signal to avoid aliasing. In practice, it is used to select band-limiting filters to keep aliasing below an acceptable amount when an analog signal is sampled or when sample rates are changed within a digital signal processing function.

The Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem is a theorem in the field of signal processing which serves as a fundamental bridge between continuous-time signals and discrete-time signals. It establishes a sufficient condition for a sample rate that permits a discrete sequence of samples to capture all the information from a continuous-time signal of finite bandwidth.

In telecommunications, a carrier wave, carrier signal, or just carrier, is a periodic waveform (usually sinusoidal) that conveys information through a process called modulation. One or more of the wave's properties, such as amplitude or frequency, are modified by an information bearing signal, called the message signal or modulation signal. The carrier frequency is usually much higher than the message signal frequency because it is usually impractical to transmit signals with low frequencies due to larger wavelength than antenna size.

The purpose of the carrier is usually either to transmit the information through space as an electromagnetic wave (as in radio communication), or to allow several carriers at different frequencies to share a common physical transmission medium by frequency division multiplexing (as in a cable television system).

Optical computing or photonic computing uses light waves produced by lasers or incoherent sources for data processing, data storage or data communication for computing. For decades, photons have shown promise to enable a higher bandwidth than the electrons used in conventional computers (see optical fibers).

Most research projects focus on replacing current computer components with optical equivalents, resulting in an optical digital computer system processing binary data. This approach appears to offer the best short-term prospects for commercial optical computing, since optical components could be integrated into traditional computers to produce an optical-electronic hybrid. However, optoelectronic devices consume 30% of their energy converting electronic energy into photons and back; this conversion also slows the transmission of messages. All-optical computers eliminate the need for optical-electrical-optical (OEO) conversions, thus reducing electrical power consumption.

The following tables show the frequencies assigned to analog broadcast television channels in various regions of the world, along with the ITU letter designator for the transmission system used. The frequencies shown are for the channel limits and for the analog video and audio carriers. The channel itself usually occupies 6, 7 or 8 megahertz of bandwidth depending on the television transmission system in use. For example, North American channel 1 occupies the spectrum from 44 to 50 MHz. See Broadcast television systems for a table of signal characteristics, including bandwidth, by ITU letter designator. Analog television broadcasts have been phased out in most regions, having been replaced by digital television broadcasts.

Johnson–Nyquist noise (thermal noise, Johnson noise, or Nyquist noise) is the voltage or current noise generated by the thermal agitation of the charge carriers (usually the electrons) inside an electrical conductor at equilibrium, which happens regardless of any applied voltage. Thermal noise is present in all electrical circuits, and in sensitive electronic equipment (such as radio receivers) can drown out weak signals, and can be the limiting factor on sensitivity of electrical measuring instruments. Thermal noise is proportional to absolute temperature, so some sensitive electronic equipment such as radio telescope receivers are cooled to cryogenic temperatures to improve their signal-to-noise ratio. The generic, statistical physical derivation of this noise is called the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, where generalized impedance or generalized susceptibility is used to characterize the medium.

Thermal noise in an ideal resistor is approximately white, meaning that its power spectral density is nearly constant throughout the frequency spectrum (Figure 2). When limited to a finite bandwidth and viewed in the time domain (as sketched in Figure 1), thermal noise has a nearly Gaussian amplitude distribution.

In signal processing, the Nyquist frequency (or folding frequency), named after Harry Nyquist, is a characteristic of a sampler, which converts a continuous function or signal into a discrete sequence. For a given sampling rate (samples per second), the Nyquist frequency (cycles per second) is the frequency whose cycle-length (or period) is twice the interval between samples, thus 0.5 cycle/sample. For example, audio CDs have a sampling rate of 44100 samples/second. At 0.5 cycle/sample, the corresponding Nyquist frequency is 22050 cycles/second (Hz). Conversely, the Nyquist rate for sampling a 22050 Hz signal is 44100 samples/second.

When the highest frequency (bandwidth) of a signal is less than the Nyquist frequency of the sampler, the resulting discrete-time sequence is said to be free of the distortion known as aliasing, and the corresponding sample rate is said to be above the Nyquist rate for that particular signal.

In a distribution, full width at half maximum (FWHM) is the difference between the two values of the independent variable at which the dependent variable is equal to half of its maximum value. In other words, it is the width of a spectrum curve measured between those points on the y-axis which are half the maximum amplitude.Half width at half maximum (HWHM) is half of the FWHM if the function is symmetric.The term full duration at half maximum (FDHM) is preferred when the independent variable is time.

FWHM is applied to such phenomena as the duration of pulse waveforms and the spectral width of sources used for optical communications and the resolution of spectrometers.The convention of "width" meaning "half maximum" is also widely used in signal processing to define bandwidth as "width of frequency range where less than half the signal's power is attenuated", i.e., the power is at least half the maximum. In signal processing terms, this is at most −3 dB of attenuation, called half-power point or, more specifically, half-power bandwidth.When half-power point is applied to antenna beam width, it is called half-power beam width.