Or at least “explain it like I am an 8th grader.” I am a middle school science teacher and am struggling with explaining these concepts in a simplified way that my students can understand. They have some prior knowledge about waves and how they travel. I appreciate any help you can provide!
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Its how they‘re interpreted
In both cases the fundamental signal is just analog waveforms, thats how we physically transmit signals over eg. cables.
An Analog Signal is interpreted as is. You transmit a waveform and the amplitude, frequency and signal strength define what you transmit. If you transmit a sine wave with an anplitude of 2V and a frequency of 50hz thats all it will ever be. A good example would be a tin-can telephone. You speak into it, your voice vibrates the string and transmit this to the other side and on the other side a person can hear the voice. Now analog signals are very prone to external influences, eg. if you make your string ridiculously long it could be so far apart that the person on the other side might not hear anything or very quiet. Or if another string crosses yours you could pick up conversations from another Person. All those problems make analog signals not very „good“ however if you manage to transmit your signal without any influences or signal losses you will get a 1 to 1 transmission.
Digital signals are „encoded“. We basically defined that eg. 0-0.8V is considered „low“ or „0“ and 2-5V is considered „high“ or „1“. Now if we send a signal from one side to the other it doesn‘t really matter if a „high“ signal we send out with 5V reaches the other side as 4.3V due to signal loss and resistence. It will still be interpreted as „high“. Heck it can even reach it as 2.8V. As long as the signal stays in the before mentioned parameters we will always be able to correctly decode it and thus never lose informations due to exteriour influences. A good analogy would be thetin-can telephone from earlier, but instead of speaking into it and sending your voice to the other side, you want to transmit a message. And to transmit the message you use morse code by tapping the tin-can. Now as long as the person on the other side can clearly identify the taps it doesn‘t matter if they‘re quieter than the original ones because of the string length. Or if the taps sound a bit different in frequency. As long as you can make them out you will never lose informations. However while you did transmit 100% of the information, by encoding an analog signal into a digital one (like encoding the sentence (voice) you used to say over the tin-can telephone into morse code so you can tapp it and thus can never recreate the original voice that said the sentence on the other side even tho you transmitted the same information eg the sentence) you will unfortunately lose informations.
Thats what the difference in transmitting analog and digital signal means. Just how you interpret things.
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