Eli5: how does Bluetooth work?
In: Technology
It is basically like a radio. Radio stations transmits via towers sending radio signals. They move like waves in every direction. A radio is designed to pick up those signals and reproduce the sounds in the speaker. Well, Bluetooth does the same. Your device is a mini radio station and the speaker/headphones/earphones are mini radios
It’s just another wireless technology. A transmitter translates data into zeroes and ones, and pulses them out on a specific radio frequency.
A receiver listening on that radio frequency catches the zeroes and ones, recompiles them into information, and passes the data onto the computer’s processor.
Every wireless technology uses the same essential methodology, and then differs in frequency and encoding of the data.
The main difference between Bluetooth and various other wireless communication systems is FHSS
Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum.
(Invented by the beautiful female blond actress – go figure!!!)
What it essentially means is that, rather than communicating on one set frequency – Bluetooth changes frequency continuously and many times in a second (which are predefined, and planned and agreed upon by all connected parties) so that if it happens that one frequency has some large amount of noise and therefore message wasn’t transmitted clearly; immediately after another frequency is selected those bits of ones and zeros will be transmitted again – thus making a message become complete.
So, in a a nutshell: Bluetooth will not check for noise and cleanliness of signal on a given frequency before changing frequencies on both ends; it will constantly change frequencies in order to be successful in transmitting messages in a noisy environment.
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