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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The distinction is more important in why we use them than what they are.
Analog signals are taking and manipulating information as is. A 2 khz wave at a certain voltage and power will produce a tone at a known volume. Increase the voltage and increase the volume. This makes things easy, but it comes with a problem: your signal is never pure. It will pick up environmental noise, and at every step you will be processing the noise with it. This is not much of an issue when you have a lot of power behind your signal, such as with powering a speaker.
Now let’s say you want to send that signal 2 miles to a cell tower using a couple milliwatts of power. The environmental noise is now almost as strong as the signal itself. Digital signals are our solution to this. The high/low nature of a digital signal allows us to eliminate noise. The first set of processing will clean the signal up and essential it will stay clean without additional filtering.
So while in a textbook an analog signal will look like sine waves and digital will look like square waves, in the real world what gets sent wirelessly often looks like an indiscernable mess, so digital signals are used because it is easier to reconstruct it without losing infornation.
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