Acharya Institute of Technology

Department of Mechatronics Engineering

Communication System

Topic title: BRIEF HISTORY OF WIRELESSCOMMUNICATIONS

Name of the student USN AUID

Manoj B 1AY22MT413 AIT22BEMT061

Name of the Guide: Ms. Sharvani G R

Assistant Professor
Department of Mechatronics

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Contents
• Introduction
• Radio and Television Communications
• Radar Communications
• Satellite Communications
• Wireless and Mobile Communications
• Cellular Communications
• Transition from Analog to Digital Systems

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INTRODUCTION
• To appreciate the current technology and prepare ourselves to enhance its development in future, it is always interesting to
have a quick glance at the history of a technology such as wireless communications. There are always several smaller
steps that take place in leading up to the development of a new technology. Tracing the development of these earlier
discoveries in brief can help us better understand how this technology actually functions and contributes towards what
could be the next development .A brief review of the history of communications covering radio, television, radar,
satellite, wireless and mobile, cellular and other wireless networks are presented here.

Fig 1. Wireless communication

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Radio and Television Communications
• In 1874, Marconi performed simple experiments to send signals using electromagnetic waves at short distances of only
about 100 metres. Scientists and other experts at that time believed that electromagnetic waves could only be transmitted
in a straight line, and the main obstacle to radio transmission was the curvature of the earth’s surface.
• This paved the way for wireless telegraphy, also known as radio communications. The word ‘radio’ comes from the term
‘radiated energy’. In 1901, Marconi set up a transmitting station in England, and a receiving station with larger types of
antennas suspended from light kites on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean on the island of Newfoundland. For three
hours every day, a signal was transmitted and received at a distance of about 3,500 kilometres!
• Marconi also studied microwaves and early television technology. In 1927, Farnsworth gave the first public demonstration
of the television system, and developed several of the basic concepts of an electronic television system. North America’
first television station, W3XK in Wheaton, Maryland, was started in the 1930s. By 1939, widespread commercial
electronic television broadcasting started in the United States.
• The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) started regularly scheduled broadcasts in the New York area to only 400 TV
sets. In 1941, the American Federal Communications Authority set the standards for broadcast television. By 1970,
television had become the primary information and entertainment medium in the world.

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Radar Communications
• Radar has been recognised as one of the greatest scientific developments of the first half of the 20th century. The
development of radar dates back to the discoveries of the 1860s and 1870s, when James Maxwell developed the equations
that outlined the behavior of electromagnetic waves, and Heinrich Hertz discovered radio waves.
• The first successful radio range-finding experiment occurred in 1924, when the British scientist Edward Appleton used
radio echoes to determine the height of the ionosphere. The first practical radar system was produced in 1935 by the
British physicist Robert Watson-Watt. By 1939, England had established a chain of radar stations along its southern and
eastern coasts to detect aggressors in the air or on the sea.
• Radar is an active remote-sensing system that operates on the principle of echoes. A radar display shows a map-like
picture of the area being scanned. The centre of the picture corresponds to the radar antenna and the radar echoes are
shown as bright spots on the screen. Although radar is usually associated with detecting airplanes in the sky or ships on
the ocean, it is actually used in a variety of different ways such as to forecast the weather, to scan entire regions for
possible archaeological sites from space satellites and airplanes, to study potential hidden dangers in highway tunnels, to
locate stagnant pools of water in areas of dense foliage on the earth, and to provide information about the universe.
• A Doppler radar is being used today by meteorologists to locate tornados and microbursts, which are downdrafts of air
traveling at very high speeds. Doppler radar is also used by law-enforcement agencies to locate speeding motorists.

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Satellite Communications
• A satellite is any object that orbits or revolves around another object. For example, the moon is a satellite of the earth, and
the earth is a satellite of the sun. Man-made satellites provide communication capabilities around the world, transmitting
television signals, telephone calls, faxes, computer communications, and weather information. Satellites can be sent into
space through a variety of launch vehicles. The theory of satellites dates back to 325 years before the first man-made
satellite was ever launched. Sir Isaac Newton in the 1720s was probably the first person to conceive the idea of a satellite.
Newton illustrated how an artificial satellite could be launched from the earth. He pictured the earth as a high mountain
and a cannon on top of the mountain firing shots parallel to the ground. During World War II, the German military made
great strides in the development of rocket technology.
• Today, Intelsat has 19 satellites in orbit that are open to use by all nations. The Intelsat consortium owns the satellites, but
each country owns their earth-receiving stations. The explosive popularity of cellular telephones advanced the idea of
always being connected everywhere on the earth. Several companies committed themselves to providing a solution by
using satellites in low earth orbit (LEO) at a height of about 650 kilometres. Iridium, sponsored by Motorola.
• Planned to launch 66 satellites into the polar orbit to provide communications services to hand-held phones around the
world in 1998.

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Wireless and Mobile Communications
• Based on the nature of wireless transmission, wireless communication systems may be classified as simplex, half-duplex
or full-duplex. In simplex wireless systems, separate transmitters and receivers operate at the same frequency and
communication is possible in only one direction from the transmitter to the receiver at any time. For example, paging and
messaging systems are simplex wireless communication systems in which short text or alphanumeric messages are
transmitted by fixed paging transmitters and received pagers but the received messages are not acknowledged. Half-
duplex wireless systems allow two-way communication but a subscriber can only transmit or receive voice information at
any given time. The same frequency is used for both transmission and reception, with a push-to-talk feature for enabling
transmission only at a time. Walkietalkie wireless communication sets used by police and paramilitary forces are the
examples of half-duplex wireless systems.
• Full-duplex wireless communication systems allow simultaneous radio transmission and reception between the calling and
called subscribers of the system, either directly or via a base station. They use separate frequency channels (frequency
division duplex, or FDD) or different time slots on a single radio channel (time division duplex or TDD) for
communication to and from the subscriber.
• TDD has limited applications such as indoor or small-area wireless applications where the physical coverage distances are
much smaller than those encountered in conventional cellular telephone systems so as to keep the radio propagation delay
within acceptable limits. In the 1930s and 1940s, two-way full-duplex vehicle radios were installed and used by police,
utility companies, government agencies, and emergency services.

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Cellular Communications
• In 1946, AT&T introduced the first American commercial mobile radio telephone service to private customers. It consisted
of a central transmitter with one antenna which could serve a wide area. However, this system could not be used with
mobiles because of their limited transmitter power. To overcome this limitation, smaller receivers with antennas were
placed on top of buildings and on poles around the city, creating smaller cells.
• The first modern cellular telephone systems in the early 1980s used 666 channels. Advanced Mobile Phone Service
(AMPS) began setting up analog cellular telephone operations in many parts of the world. Roaming from one city or state
in the United States was easy because the US system was based on an analog cellular system. In contrast, it was almost
impossible to roam in Europe. During the 1980s, a plan was launched to create a single pan-European digital mobile
service with advanced features and easy roaming. This network started operating in 1991.
• Cellular mobile communication systems provide full-duplex communication, in which a pair of simplex RF channels with
a fixed and known frequency separation (called duplex spacing) is used to define a specific radio channel in the system.
For example, in the US AMPS standard and European GSM cellular standard, the forward channel has a frequency that is
exactly 45 MHz more than that of the reverse channel. The channel used to transfer traffic data to the mobile subscriber
from a base station is called the forward channel. The channel used to transfer traffic from the mobile subscriber to the
base station is called the reverse channel.

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Transition from Analog to Digital Systems
 In the 1980s, most mobile cellular systems were based on analog design. The GSM system can be considered as the first
digital cellular system. The different reasons that explain this transition from analog to digital technology are the
following:
• System Capacity Cellular systems experienced a very significant growth in the 1980s. Analog systems were not able to
cope with this increasing demand. In order to overcome this problem, new frequency bands were allocated for the
development of mobile cellular radio and new modulation and coding technologies were introduced. The digital radio
was, therefore, the best option to handle the capacity needs in a cost-efficient way.
• Quality Aspects The quality of the service can be considerably improved using a digital technology rather than an analog
one. In fact, analog systems carry the physical disturbances in radio transmission such as fades, multipath reception,
spurious signals or interferences to the receiver. These disturbances reduce the quality of the communication because they
produce effects such as fadeouts, crosstalks, hisses, etc.
• Compatibility with Other Systems such as ISDN The decision of adopting a digital technology for GSM was made in the
course of developing the standard. During the development of GSM, the telecommunications industry converted to digital
methods. The ISDN network is an example of this evolution. In order to make GSM compatible with the services offered
by ISDN, it was decided that the digital technology was the best option. Additionally, a digital system allows, easily than
an analog one, the implementation of future improvements and the change of its own characteristics.

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